Anna Howard Shaw's Journey PDF

# 12. Anna Howard Shaw ## February 14, 1847 - July 2, 1919 ### In the People's Voice There is a Soprano as Well as a Bass It was a pitch-black night in the forest, and Anna Howard Shaw, a newly minted Methodist minister, jostled up and down on a horse-drawn wagon. The driver was making her uneasy...

# 12. Anna Howard Shaw ## February 14, 1847 - July 2, 1919 ### In the People's Voice There is a Soprano as Well as a Bass It was a pitch-black night in the forest, and Anna Howard Shaw, a newly minted Methodist minister, jostled up and down on a horse-drawn wagon. The driver was making her uneasy with his lurid stories and coarse laugh. But she had to get to a lumber camp in northern Michigan by morning to preach a sermon. A few miles into the twenty-two-mile journey, he stopped the cart. "I'll be damned if I take you," he said. "I've got you here, and I'm going to keep you here!" At that, Anna pulled a revolver out of her purse, cocked it, and aimed it at the driver's back. "Drive on," she said. Anna arrived safely at her destination. Anna Howard Shaw knew how to survive. When she was just twelve years old, her father had dropped off his wife and five of their children at a rough-hewn, dirt-floor cabin in the Michigan woods, leaving them to fend for themselves. They were one hundred miles from the railroad and forty miles from the nearest town. "He gave no thought to the manner in which we were to make the struggle and survive the hardships before us," Anna said. The forsaken family would shiver in their freezing cabin, cowering as the howling of wolves cut through the night air. Anna was up to the challenge. She learned how to fell trees, cut wood, dig a well, plow and plant crops, hunt, fish, and cook over an open fire. But she had a dreamy side, too. She pored over the snippets of newspapers they'd pasted to the walls of their cabin to keep out the cold. She'd walk out to a clearing in the woods, step up onto a tree stump, and preach sermons to the trees. ### Women MUST have power to take their PART in the government of their COUNTRY The first time Anna spoke to a large audience, she was so terrified she fainted. Despite protests from her friends, she returned to the podium ten minutes later and started again, this time making it through to the end. As many teen girls did, Anna took up teaching to help support the family while her father and brothers were fighting in the Civil War. But in 1870, wanting to earn more, she moved in with a married sister in Big Rapids, Michigan, and became a seamstress. One fateful day only a month after she'd arrived, she heard a sermon by a visiting Universalist preacher–a woman. "It was a wonderful moment when I saw my first woman minister enter her pulpit," she said. The minister urged her to go back to school. With the backing of her sister and brother-in-law, Anna made her way through high school. She began preaching almost immediately, and in 1871, at the age of twenty-four, she was named one of the first woman preachers in the Methodist Church. From her first sermon onward, Anna's presence in the pulpit was like "a lighted match applied to gunpowder." So strong was the view of the day that women should not be ministers that Anna's own family became estranged from her for a while. In 1873, Anna went on to attend Albion College in Michigan, Boston University's School of Theology, and Boston Medical School, where she earned a doctorate in medicine. She paid her way through school by giving temperance lectures and preaching. Sometimes she was paid, sometimes not. She was at the point of starvation many times–the wolf was howling at her door, just as in her childhood. Anna met many of the great reform speakers–Frances Willard, Julia Ward Howe, and Lucy Stone among them. In 1885, she resigned from her church positions to join the suffrage cause. As a pastor, she had seen women who were virtual slaves in their own homes, underpaid and unsafe in their workplaces, and victims of male ridicule and violence. The real work of her life had begun. In Anna's view, democracy demanded equality. "In the people's voice, there is a soprano as well as a bass," she insisted. In 1888, Anna began working with sixty-eight-year-old Susan B. Anthony. They traveled thousands of miles and endured harsh frontier conditions to drum up support for suffrage. No bed to sleep on? Bread and watermelon for dinner and only raisins for breakfast? A blizzard blowing in or mud tugging at your skirts? That was nothing to a pioneer woman. Yet even Anna needed encouragement once in a while. She often drew strength from the older woman. To Susan, "the hardships we underwent... were as the airiest trifles," she said. Anna played a key role in bringing together the suffragists who split over the issue of African American males voting. The National Woman Suffrage Association and American Woman Suffrage Association had finally merged in 1890 under the leadership of Susan B. Anthony. Anna was president of the merged National American Woman Suffrage Association for eleven years, handing over the reins to Carrie Chapman Catt in 1915. When Anna wrote her memoirs that year, she saw victory ahead. "I have not yet won the great and vital fight of my life, to which I have given myself, heart and soul, for the past thirty years–the campaign for woman suffrage.... But when the ultimate triumph comes–when American women in every state cast their ballots as naturally as their husbands do–I may not be in this world to rejoice over it." Indeed, Anna did not live to see victory, but she came achingly close. She died on July 2, 1919, just two days before Congress finally passed the Nineteenth Amendment. The triumph she had tirelessly worked for did indeed come. ### In the suffrage fight, there were bass voices as well as soprano ones. Much of the credit for the full chorus goes to Anna Howard Shaw. At Anna's urging, several prominent men formed the Men's League for Woman Suffrage in 1909. James Lees Laidlaw, a banker and the husband of suffragist Harriet Burton Laidlaw, was the league's president. He organized male delegations to march in suffrage parades. Max Eastman, a reformer who had grown up in a suffrage household, spoke on college campuses and helped students form suffrage associations. By 1912, the league boasted twenty thousand members. Forming a league was key to drawing men to the cause. "There are many men who inwardly feel the justice of equal suffrage, but who are not ready to acknowledge it publicly, unless backed by numbers," Laidlaw said. These men endured taunts and bullying just as female suffragists did. During parades, onlookers jeered them–"Henpecko!" or "Hold up your skirts, girls!" As one member said: "Tagging after the girls–that's what we were doing; and nobody would let us forget it." But the men held their ground.