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Biographical Note
Anna Howard Shaw was born on February 14, 1847 in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England.  Soon after her second birthday, her family left for America.  They settled first in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where young Anna read and re-read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and became passionate about issues of slavery.  

When the Shaws moved again in 1859, they found themselves in a much different environment: the wild forests of Michigan. Anna and her family lived in a tiny log cabin surrounded by 360 acres of wilderness.  Her father and her two oldest brothers returned to Lawrence to work, leaving Anna, four siblings, and her mother to fend for themselves.  Finally, at the age of 15, Shaw was able to get work as a schoolteacher, earning two dollars a week.  It was at this point that she first dreamed of becoming a minister.  When her older sister got married, she invited Shaw to live with her in the town of Big Rapids.  Here Anna attended high school and met an influential mentor, Miss Lucy Foote.  Through Miss Foote’s guidance, she was invited to give her first sermon in the village of Ashton.

Shaw’s family vehemently disapproved of her ambition to become a preacher, and they offered to pay her way through the University of Michigan if she abandoned the idea.  She preached on thirty-six more occasions that year, however, and then decided to attend Albion College without any financial assistance.  She was nearly broke when she arrived at Albion, and the President, George Jocelyn, was impressed by her and allowed her to live with his family during her first year at school.  Shaw gave a series of temperance lectures in an effort to defray the costs of her education, and Miss Foote took up a collection totaling ninety-two dollars from her friends in Big Rapids. 

In 1876, Shaw began to study for the ministry at Boston University.  She was the only woman in her class, and she still had to get by on limited funds.  After her graduation, she was pastor of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in East Dennis, Massachusetts for seven years.  In 1882 she decided she wanted to attend medical school as well, and in 1885 she became a physician as well as a minister, preaching at two churches and treating the urban poor three days a week.

Soon, Shaw decided to give up her ministry posts altogether, choosing to travel the country lecturing on temperance, and later traveling with Susan B. Anthony for the cause of women’s suffrage.  Shaw continued to cross the country and campaign for women’s rights for the next eighteen years.  She was elected president of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1904.  Shaw held this position until 1915, when she looked forward to retirement at her home in Moylan, Pennsylvania.  

In 1917, however, war came to the country and the Council of National Defense appointed Dr. Shaw as Chairman of the Women’s Committee.  Shaw served as Chairman until 1919, when she again expected to retire, but was asked to travel through the country with former President Taft and Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell.  Their aim was to generate support for the newly formed League of Nations.  This proved to be too much for Shaw, however, and she checked herself into an Illinois hospital. 

Shaw died at her home in Pennsylvania on July 2, 1919.  A year after her death, the government finally accepted her life’s message and ratified the 19^th Amendment, giving women the vote.

Scope and Content
The Anna Howard Shaw Collection is made up of six series: Photographs, Memorial Documents, News Clippings, Albion College Correspondence, Shaw’s Writings, and Miscellaneous. 

The Photographs series can be found in Folder 1.  It contains photos of Shaw at various stages of her life, from her student days at Albion to her later years as a famous suffragist.  The series includes portraits of many sizes and informal photos.

The Memorial Documents series includes three folders.  The first two contain programs and articles from events held in Shaw’s memory, one for Albion-related events and one for events held elsewhere.  The third folder in the series contains biographical articles and tributes published after Shaw’s death. 

The third series, News Clippings, is made up of a folder containing Shaw-related newspaper articles.  One sequence of articles documents plans for a statue of Shaw built in Big Rapids, another discusses the 1930 memorial dinner held at Albion College.

Series Four, Correspondence, consists of two Subseries: Albion College Correspondence and Correspondence from Anna Howard Shaw.  The first subseries consists of letters to and from Albion College about Shaw.  Folder 1 contains Archives-related correspondence, dealing with donations of photographs and effects of Shaw to the Albion College Archives; the second contains correspondence dealing with the 1930 memorial dinner to Shaw.  Subseries 2 contains letters from Shaw herself, dated 1875, 1908, 1911 and 1915.

Series Five, Publications, contains several magazine articles and a pamphlet written on women’s war efforts – all written by Shaw.

Inventory