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This chapter considers the life of Anna Howard Shaw after her 1915 resignation from the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Official retirement, although at first it brought a lessening of her administrative responsibilities, in the end allowed Shaw the freedom to broaden her involvements. During these last years, much of the public, from the youngest suffrage supporter up to the U.S. president, saw her as an elder stateswoman, a role Shaw enthusiastically embraced. On February 14, 1917, Shaw celebrated her seventieth birthday. Close to two hundred letters, gifts, and congratulations from her long-time suffrage colleagues through President Wilson celebrated her life. On May 19, 1919, Shaw became the first woman to be honored with the Distinguished Service Medal, the government's highest civilian award. Shaw died on July 2, 1919.

This chapter describes events in the life of Anna Howard Shaw from 1890 to 1903. In 1890, Shaw joined Susan B. Anthony and other suffrage workers in South Dakota for her first state suffrage campaign. Though the rigors of this campaign tested even Shaw's adaptability, at forty-three, Shaw was at her peak in terms of health and vigor. She embraced her new calling, her new pulpit, and her new form of ministry. She was quickly becoming the movement's new voice, a leader whose nonelite origins gave her a remarkable ability to translate women's demands into appeals understandable to a diversity of Americans. Her strengths as a speaker and the depth of her commitments to women's causes were put to the test here, but she toughed it out as a true daughter of the frontier.

This chapter examines the final years of Anna Howard Shaw's presidency from 1913 to 1915. By 1913 Anna Shaw could see the end of the struggle. The movement to extend that basic right of equal citizenship—full suffrage—to all women now had sufficient momentum to see it through to the final victory. After years of slow progress and the efforts of generations of women, Shaw was leading “the cause” with new leaders and organizations, extensive financial resources, regular attention from the media and politicians, and finally new suffrage gains in major western states. However, though she believed the success was inevitable and near, the final years of her presidency threw up hurdles that complicated Shaw's leadership and administrative efforts. This period, during a tremendous period of suffrage activism, Shaw confronted new difficulties and made occasional, but significant, missteps in her efforts to close the final chapter of the suffrage struggle. At that 1915 NAWSA Convention in Washington, D. C., Shaw turned the leadership position to Carrie Chapman Catt.

This chapter examines the middle years of Anna Howard Shaw's presidency—from planning for the 1909 the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Convention in Seattle through the 1912 convention in Philadelphia. While analyses critical of Shaw's presidency have most frequently used the upheavals of these years as the basis for judging Shaw as a failure as an administrator, the gains of these years as well as the full context and origins of these organizational conflicts have received scant in-depth attention. Class and race issues are especially significant for analyzing both Shaw's legacy as a leader and the positions of the suffrage movement as a whole. Money tensions had always haunted the NAWSA, but the fact that Shaw drew a salary for her presidency and had access to monies beyond the control of the NAWSA treasurer raised suspicions among the privileged leaders who linked financial need with corruption. That Shaw was also the strongest and most consistent supporter of universal suffrage brought additional resistance from those who were opposed to or willing to compromise on the extension of the franchise to African American and immigrant women.

This chapter describes events in the life of Anna Howard Shaw from 1881 to 1889. Over the course of the 1880s Shaw willingly gave up the comfortable but limited life of a small town minister to dedicate herself to changing the inequalities of the social structure in ways that she believed would better women's lives more than any work she could do as a minister. Fortunately for Shaw, she turned out to have many of the talents, skills, and attributes that the leaders and the constituencies of the woman suffrage and women's temperance movements needed and valued. By 1888, Shaw would state that, “I have registered a vow that I will from this time forth never work for any political party, never give one dollar to any religious body, home or foreign, never listen Sunday after Sunday to the preaching of any man, never give one ounce of my strength of body or purse, or mind, or heart to any cause which opposes the best interest of women. ” Fortunately, Shaw achieved the independence to make those decisions.

This chapter details the early life of Anna Howard Shaw. Anna was born on St. Valentine's Day in 1847 to Thomas and Nicolas Shaw, in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in northeast England, the sixth child and the third daughter of a bankrupt Scottish family. While all members of such struggling families in the mid-nineteenth century faced bleak and limited futures, girl-children, if they survived, had even fewer opportunities. In 1849, her father Thomas sailed for the United States, and in August 1851 Nicolas and her six children boarded the Jacob A. Westervelt in Liverpool for what was to be a seven-week passage to New York. The family made their first American home in the old whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts. They then moved to a new mill town, Lawrence, in the North on the Merrimac River, which would be their home for the next seven years, during the nation-changing decade of the 1850s. When the Civil War started in April 1861, Anna's two brothers and father volunteered. At only sixteen, Anna shouldered the responsibility for her family's survival.

This chapter describes events in the life of Anna Howard Shaw from 1871 to 1880. Shaw had a vision that God had called her to a larger life. However, with no independent means of wealth, her choices appeared to be limited to marrying or resigning herself to struggle along as an impoverished schoolteacher, living in her parents' home. To gain access to any formal education for herself, she would have to leave that home. At this point Anna turned to the only resource she did have beyond her own dreams, ingenuity, and determination—her sister Mary, who had married a successful entrepreneur. So it was that Anna made the difficult and seemingly selfish decision to leave her parents' home and move in with her sister to seek her options in the small town of Big Rapids, Michigan. On August 26, 1873, the Big Rapids District Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church enthusiastically licensed twenty-six-year-old “Annie Howard Shaw” as a local preacher. In June 1878 Shaw sailed for Europe. By then she had earned her education and possessed her first investments. This thirty-one-year-old daughter of impoverished immigrants returned to tour the great sights of the continent.

This chapter examines the early years of Anna Howard Shaw's National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) presidency. With little scholarship on Shaw's leadership, most historians follow the position originated by Eleanor Flexner that Shaw's tenure was chaotic and that Shaw an ineffective administrator. The only major challenge to this view comes from the late Sarah Hunter Graham and her argument that these were the years of a suffrage renaissance. The tensions and conflicts under Shaw's leadership were essential for the change that revitalized the NAWSA. Key challenges involved economic and racial issues, the focus on the federal amendment, and what the move to New York and the professionalization of the staff meant. Feminist suffrage scholarship generally has concluded that a conservative and racist NAWSA and Shaw were finally challenged by younger, more radical leaders. However, a close examination of Shaw's presidency finds that the dynamics within the NAWSA and the suffrage struggle to be far more complex.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the life and accomplishments of Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919) as well as the author's account of how she became interested in Shaw. It then sets out the book's primary purpose, which is to provide a much-needed biography of a major figure in U.S. women's history. The book is also a historiographic mystery. How and why have so few historians taken an in-depth look at Anna Howard Shaw? Why is there no discussion of the fact that she was the first and only salaried president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association? And certainly the core question remains: how important was Shaw to the woman's suffrage movement? The chapter urges two core changes to Shaw scholarship. First we must consider what the sources actually tell us. The second is to open up the analyses and consider the possibility of other views of Shaw.

This chapter reviews Anna Howard Shaw's life and accomplishments, and presents some final thoughts. The author says that over the years of researching Anna Howard Shaw, she was driven by a quest to understand not only the life of this remarkable woman but also how women's history transformed this transgressive, irreverent pioneering woman into an incompetent and conservative leader. She argues that denying the immensity of Shaw's contributions to woman suffrage demands ignoring a great deal of documentation. Although one book and one view can hardly answer all the questions concerning Shaw's place in U.S. and woman suffrage history, hopefully this biography, by bringing new sources and new evidence into the discussion and by reframing the issues, has kept the inquiry open.

In 1911, following the loss of her mother, Crystal Eastman married Wallace “Bennie” Benedict and moved to his home state of Wisconsin. Unable to find work as a lawyer, she accepted a job as campaign manager for the state’s suffrage drive. After a vicious battle, including opposition from the powerful brewing industry and elected officials, the measure lost two to one. Eastman returned to the Village in 1913, with Bennie in tow. He would soon initiate an affair, inciting a divorce that was finalized in 1916. Meanwhile, Eastman had united with Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, organizing the younger, more confrontational suffrage women to found the militant wing of the suffrage movement that became the National Woman’s Party. The group’s actions inside and outside the US Congress, including spectacular demonstrations and White House picketing to target the “party in power”—Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats—would finally leverage votes for women.