Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)

Anna Howard Shaw was born in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, and emigrated with her family to the USA as a small child. She grew up first in Lawrence, Massachusetts, then on an isolated farm near Big Rapids in northern Michigan, which was then frontier territory. At age 12, with her father absent, she had to assume the physically hard tasks of clearing the land, planting the crops, digging wells, and chopping firewood, as well as caring for her semi-invalid mother and younger siblings.

She was essentially self-educated, and at 15 got a job to help support the family as a school teacher. After the Civil War, she moved into the home of a married sister and attended high school while working as a seamstress. She became active in the Methodist church, preaching her first sermon at age 23. In 1873, she entered Albion College, paying for her education by preaching and giving lectures on temperance. Two years later, she enrolled in the divinity school at Boston University, from which she graduated in 1878 as the only woman in her class. In addition to ministering at two churches, Anna earned a medical degree from Boston University in 1886. However, she never practiced medicine. Instead, she took up the causes of temperance and women's suffrage full-time. She became a familiar figure at demonstrations, conferences, Congressional hearings, and on the lecture circuit in every state in the country. For a few years, she headed the Franchise Department of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. In 1904, she became president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. During World War I, Anna turned her attention to home-front war work, and became chair of the Woman’s Committee of the U.S. Council of National Defense. For this work, in 1919 she became the first woman to earn the Distinguished Service Medal. At the end of the war, she campaigned vigorously in the USA and Europe in support of the plan for the new League of Nations. During one of those speaking tours, she fell ill and died. Her 1915 autobiography was aptly named The Story of a Pioneer.