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The last day of the new year of the new century and I am alone from Lucy in a strange land. I hope it is the last time so long as we both live that I shall have to feel that I must leave her and go alone. With the new year will come a hope that before it closes we shall have fixed upon the spot where we will find rest and peace and grow old and good and useful together. God bless her.
—Anna Howard Shaw, Kingston, Jamaica
“A True, Lovable Woman”: Shaw’s Masquerade
WHEN ANNA HOWARD SHAW DIED, in 1919—shortly after the United States Senate passed the amendment giving women the vote, for which she had fought much of her life—her obituaries depicted her as “the strongest force for the advancement of women that the age has known.” The New York Times printed a eulogy—significantly, on Independence Day—comparing her to Abraham Lincoln, praising her “measureless patience . . . deep and gentle humor . . . and whimsical and tolerant philosophy.” While other suffragist leaders had been described by the media as grim, Shaw was dubbed by the obituary writer for The Nation as “the ideal type of reformer”: “She was the despair of the anti-suffragists, because she was so normal and sane, so sound and effective. . . . With a mind that was a match for any man’s in its cleverness and logic, her feminine charm [italics are mine] never left her.”
In the game of gender, Shaw preferred to play masculine, but for the sake of the cause she consciously constructed the “feminine charm” of her public persona after some irritating experiences. In the 1880s, early in her public career, she sported a distinctly mannish hairdo. When someone snidely asked in a roomful of people why she wore her hair so short, she retorted (intending to be clever, but unintentionally delivering a Krafft-Ebing-ism), “I will admit frankly that it is a birthmark. I was born with short hair.” Despite the bravado of this retort, she grew her hair longer and arranged it in a decorous bun.
Her willingness to alter her style for the sake of the cause extended even to aspects of her life that were only semipublic. In 1895, Shaw and Lucy Anthony entertained a number of suffragists in Wianno, a seaside resort where they had a summer home, and all appeared on the public beach wearing knickerbockers or skirtless swimsuits. The New York World somehow discovered the unconventional sartorial habits of the bunch and sent a reporter, who wrote a long, sensational article for the Sunday edition, replete with numerous boldface headlines: “AN ADAMLESS EDEN OF WOMEN IN BLOOMERS,” “Summer Suffragists Who Discard Skirts and Wear Bathing Suits Just Like a Man,” “THE REV. ANNA SHAW’S INTERESTING COLONY AT SELECT WIANNO,” “For Comfort’s Sake They Go Crabbing and Walking in Costumes [Wianno] Founder Bradley Would Shudder At, But Are Not Dress Reformers.” The article was accompanied by a drawing of Shaw (in a skirt) eyeing her young friends decked out in pants, their appearance undoubtedly calculated by the artist to elicit the shocked response, “Those girls look like boys!”
Shaw called the article “almost libelous” in her autobiography. Yet despite her perturbation, the experience confirmed that she needed to exercise care, even in such a setting. She believed that “no woman in public life can afford to make herself conspicuous by an eccentricity of dress and appearance. If she does so she suffers for it herself, which may not disturb her, and to a greater degree, for the cause she represents, which should disturb her.” Shaw saw the suffrage cause as so crucial that she would make whatever concessions to conformity she was convinced she must make in public. As her correspondence indicates, however, at home, with Lucy and with other women who were her lovers at various times, she was as butch as she pleased.
Shaw crafted her appearance to conform to her audience’s standard of decorum, but it was a superficial concession. In all other ways she undermined appropriate gender behavior. She was a forceful and dynamic public speaker at a time when virtuous women were supposed to be demure and silent. She was powerfully assertive when passivity was the norm for women. Shaw was convinced that if she presented herself as being as radical, as angry, as impatient as she truly was, she could do nothing for the cause. Therefore, as she grew older she cultivated a grandmotherly persona, which helped make her “esteemed by her countrymen, males as well as females.”
However, a scrutiny of Shaw’s life suggests that she, like Frances Willard, might in fact easily have stepped out of the pages of Havelock Ellis’s “Sexual Inversion in Women.” When Shaw’s father left his invalid wife and children on 368 acres of land in the northern Michigan wilderness, Anna’s sisters did the housework while she and her brothers did the outdoor work—“an arrangement that suited me very well,” she admitted in her autobiography. She found all typical little-girl pursuits frivolous and from the youngest age loved playing with a hatchet and saw. She determined early that she would go to college, even though, “so far as I knew . . . no woman had gone to college.” When she was forced, briefly, to sew for a living, she declared that she would have preferred “the digging of ditches or the shoveling of coal.”
In her public life she was too shrewd to be a man-basher. “We will never win the battle by ‘bully ragging,”’ she warned a more plainspoken suffragist. But in her private life she had little use for the male of the species. To an old friend who expressed the desire to be married, Shaw wrote, “Just think of the men along your street” and enumerated each with his various faults. “If a human being or a god could conceive of a worse hell than being a wife of any one of them I would like to know what it could be.” After delineating to her friend her own rich, full life without a man, she concluded, “I have seen nothing so far which does not make me say every night of my life, ‘I thank thee for all good but for nothing more than that I have been saved from the misery of marriage.’”
Anna Shaw had a number of passionate relationships with women. In the early 1870s, for example, when she was an undergraduate at Albion College, she was writing vehemently to Clara Osburn: “My dear little girl, I love you so much and want so much to see you. I want you to come out here. I have set my heart on it and it does not seem as though I could be disappointed. Can’t you come[?] I will help you, will you come if you can?” A more significant relationship began in 1876, with Persis Addy. After Shaw discovered her speaking talents at Albion, she decided to take a graduate degree in theology at Boston University, where she was the only woman in a class with forty-two men. As a divinity student she preached in several Cape Cod pulpits, and it was there that she met Persis, a young widow, who became her first mature love. Like Willard, Shaw did not hide her love for women in her 1915 autobiography: “[Persis] brought me at once the greatest happiness and [because of her early death] deepest sorrow of that period of my life,” she confessed.
The pattern of most of Shaw’s lesbian relationships was also like that of Willard, who was attracted to nurturing women who would support her work. Persis and Anna met during the summer. In the autumn of 1876, Persis returned with Anna to Boston, where they lived together while Anna finished divinity school. Persis’s “coming opened windows into a new world. I was no longer lonely,” Anna wrote openly. “For the first time, I had someone to come home to, someone to confide in, . . . listen to, and love.” Persis, who was wealthy, virtually supported Anna and “gave me my first experience of an existence in which comfort and culture . . . were cheerful commonplaces.” Anna called their dyad “a family of two.”
Their relationship was short-lived, however. Persis died in 1878, and Anna apparently lived in solitude for ten years. But she was miserable alone. As she confided to a friend, “I would give years of my life and any celebrity which could come to know that in my later years I should have someone always with me who loved me.” She was ultimately fortunate in that she managed to achieve it all: celebrity, a relatively long life, and someone always with her who loved her as well. But she never ceased mourning and memorializing Persis. Twenty-four years after Persis’s death, Anna wrote in her diary that she wondered if Persis in the “other world” knew about her loving relationship with Lucy: “If she knows she will be glad of Lucy’s loving care for me. I am sure she will love her for it,” she concluded, comforting herself.
In view of Shaw’s earlier concern over the accusation that she looked masculine and her quick determination to alter that appearance, her confessions about Persis in her autobiography may be surprising. She did not seem to fear the possibility that her readers might connect her love for Persis with sexual inversion. Her failure to censor herself surely demonstrates that when she wrote her autobiography, in 1915, she still believed that such relationships continued to be viewed through the lens of innocent romantic friendship. She was certain that love between women—the sexual possibilities of which perhaps continued to be discounted among the uninitiated—was perceived as unthreatening to her society; it was women’s claims on male prerogatives, such as inverting gender, being “unsexed,” that brought social disdain. Therefore, as long as she made a performance of femininity, she believed, she risked nothing by revealing her gentle love of a woman who was lost to Thanatos.
Shaw apparently counted so much on the public’s refusal to acknowledge the possibility of anything more profound between women than romantic friendship that she dared to report, seemingly without self-consciousness, a joke that went around when she was a minister: there was “a charge [against her] never before made against a Cape Cod minister,” to wit, “All the women in town are in love with Miss Shaw. Has that been charged against any other minister here?”
Shaw held a pulpit for seven years after Persis Addy’s death, but she discovered that as a minister she was not able to deal directly enough with the problems of women, which were far more interesting to her than theology. Therefore, she studied for a medical degree (which she received from Boston University in 1886), working her way through medical school as a lecturer on suffragism and temperance and doing her internship among poor women. In 1887, while practicing as a doctor, she was hired as a lecturer for Lucy Stone’s American Woman Suffrage Association. The following year she met Frances Willard, by then the president of the national WCTU, and Willard convinced her to become head of the suffrage department of that organization.
Willard must have recognized a kindred spirit in Anna Howard Shaw. Through the years, each sent greetings from her mate, Willard’s Anna Gordon and Shaw’s Lucy Anthony, in her correspondence. But some of their letters evince the flirtation and electricity between each other that were common among movement women. For example, Frances wrote to Anna, “You are dear to me and trusted by me always everywhere. I only wish I were less unworthy of your confidence. If you would ‘take me in hand’ and ‘Deal with me in righteousness’ as my clerical confessor I would try hard to improve.”
Whatever the nature of their personal relationship actually was, it is clear that Shaw learned from Willard a skill that was to stand her in good stead as a lecturer throughout her life: how to mediate a message so as to convince a recalcitrant audience. Anna Shaw’s success as a suffrage lecturer was rapid, and it made her decide to give up her career in medicine while it was still in its infancy. Finally she had found what she had hoped to find in the ministry and medicine, an occupation that permitted her to engage directly with her primary interest—working to alleviate the burdens suffered by those who were born female.
The social historian James McGovern has estimated that in the course of Shaw’s career as a women’s rights orator, lecturing steadily for more than thirty years in civic centers, churches, and colleges in every state of the union, she probably reached five million people. Her press reviews were raves. For example, the mass circulation North American Magazine opined that she was generally considered “the greatest woman speaker who ever lived,” that many even believed her to be “without peer in either sex among orators of her day.” The Pomona Weekly Times’s assessment of her as a lecturer in 1895 reveals the enthusiasm she met with even in small towns and testifies to how successful she was in convincing her audience that her assumed persona was authentic and admirable and that her cause was just:
Miss Shaw occupied seventy minutes and devoted her time to the legal rights of women. Her facts were so evident, her arguments so forceful and logical, her diction so elegant, her satire so velvety, that when done many thought she had used up twenty minutes instead of seventy. Those who differ with the policies she advocates admit that as a good natured, polished, and convincing speaker she has no superior. And she is a woman—a true, lovable woman.
Though Shaw’s lectures indicate little intellectual profundity, they evince something more important for a speaker attempting to convince large audiences to support an unpopular cause: an acute cognizance of where her audience is emotionally situated and how to move them forward step by step; how to disarm them with accessible, good-natured humor; and, that being accomplished, how to educate them toward her goal. For example, in a lecture of the early 1890s, “The New Man,” Shaw hastened to allay fears that the “new woman” desired to rid herself of her femininity by “invad[ing men’s] prerogative in dress. This is a useless fear,” she quipped, “as the real new woman will always want to look as well as she can and no human being could look well in men’s clothes, so the new woman will not wear them for that reason if for no other.” After such levity, however, and some crucial assurances that she was not arguing for anything particularly radical (for instance, “The new woman is the same old woman, with a few modern improvements”), Shaw moved to the nugget of her message, which was indeed radical for her era: women have the right to the advantages of an education, to the opportunities for entering any trade or profession that suits them, to all the avenues that will bring them in contact with “the larger life of the world” and permit them to become “more broad-minded and better developed.”
As an orator, Shaw was intent on getting her mass audiences to identify with her, which would enable her to bring them to her side. Thus, before she delivered her radical punch lines, she often disarmed her listeners by speaking in the voice of a heterosexual woman and seducing them with her folksy but womanly humor, which helped to distract them from meditating on her unsexed, spinsterish state. For example, in “The Fundamental Principle of a Republic,” Shaw mocked antisuffragists who worried that women’s enfranchisement would bring discord into the home through political disagreements. She argued that if there were never disagreements between two intelligent human beings, their relationship would stagnate. “Now it may be that the kind of man . . . the anti-suffragists live with [would prefer stagnation to occasional disagreements],” she suggested, “but they are not the kind we live with, and we could not do it. Great big overgrown babies! Cannot be disputed without having a row!” Her audiences howled at her poker-faced annoyance with the image of “big overgrown babies,” and she would continue: “While we do not believe that men are saints, we do believe that the average American man is a fairly good sort of fellow.”
The men in her audience would of course agree that they were the good sorts who could handle a little disagreement; none of the women would admit that she would tolerate being married to a big overgrown baby. Having captured her listeners thus far, Shaw lulled them further in domestic coziness before hitting them with her chief argument. She claimed to grant that of course “men and women must go through this world together from the cradle to the grave.” But that being the case, just as you can’t “build up homes without men,” you can’t “build up the state without women.” Women’s participation in the state, she concluded, must be “the fundamental principle of a republican form of government.”
Such speeches were wildly popular, in the boondocks as well as in New York.
“My dear, dear Balance”
In 1888, Shaw shared a platform at the International Council of Women conference with Susan B. Anthony. Through her, Shaw met Lucy Anthony, Susan’s niece, and the two Anthony women soon became the most important people in Shaw’s life. By 1890, Susan Anthony, who was always looking for exceptional lecturers for the cause and believed she had found a most remarkable one in Shaw, convinced the younger woman to leave her work for the WCTU and travel with her as national lecturer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, just created through the efforts of Alice Stone Blackwell.
In her autobiography, Shaw claimed that Susan Anthony “fired my soul with the flame that burned so steadily in her own” and called her “the torch that illumined my life.” She insisted that initially she saw her own role in their travels as “bonnet holder” to the famous Susan B. Anthony. But the audience’s enthusiasm for her speeches soon made Shaw feel that she had come out from behind the beloved shadow and could truly hold her own. In fact, though Anthony was the major symbol and representative of the suffrage movement in the 1890s by virtue of her close to half-a-century leadership in the cause, she was an indifferent speaker. While audiences venerated her as a pioneer and a valiant spirit, it was Shaw who carried them away with what they received as oratorical brilliance. The two thus made an excellent podium team from the beginning, Anthony with her stature and Shaw with her skill.
Sharing platforms all over America with the famous Susan B. Anthony brought Shaw much quicker fame than she might have attained on her own. Anthony made it clear that Shaw was her heir apparent, as NAWSA members seemed to think in 1894, when Anthony was seventy-four years old and Shaw was forty-seven. Their birthdays were two days apart, so the organization staged a birthday banquet for them both, decorating the main table with floral 4’s and 7’s. During the first half of the banquet, the centerpiece represented 74, and during the second half the numbers were reversed to 47.
Shaw did eventually assume the presidency of NAWSA, but she surely would have said that the gift of the limelight was not the most important one she received from Susan B. Anthony. The greatest gift was Lucy, Susan’s niece. The correspondence between Anna Shaw and Lucy Anthony began soon after they met. Anna’s April 27, 1888, response to a letter from Lucy (now lost) hints at Lucy’s immediate infatuation and Anna’s teasing, careful encouragement: “So you are very fond of me? You must be or you would not give me such unmerited praise for my sermon. Whatever there was of merit in it was due to the time and circumstances. . . . I just could not help doing my best, and you are all a part of it. . . . I shall always be glad to get a line from you.”
By February 1889, when Anna was planning a lecture trip to California, Lucy had apparently “proposed” to her, offering to perform wifely duties if she could travel with her. “So you could not only write my letters, buy my railroad tickets, check baggage, etc., but look after my clothes,” Anna teased her. “I wish you and your needle were here this minute.” Their relationship escalated quickly after this point. The following July, Anna wrote to Lucy saying that she intended to make a new will since she traveled so much and railroad accidents were so frequent: “I believe you do love me and it would make a difference whether my name was on the list of killed someday to you.” She assured Lucy, however, that “I am going to live as long as I can and make you [live long] too.”
The two women soon began to plan the future, when they might share a home, and Lucy encouraged Anna to return to the ministry, which would enable her to stay in one place instead of traveling constantly. In a January 1890 letter, Anna promised that they would indeed someday have a home, “but that cannot be until we have suffrage for women. We have put our hand to the plow, and we cannot turn back to rest or enjoy ourselves in the quiet of a home nest.” In the meantime, they would not only devote themselves to the cause but plan for the happier days to come, and as for the present, it would be “always . . . a happy rest time for us just to be together.” Seven months later, however, they were making specific plans to live together soon, in Washington, D.C. Anna wrote to Lucy from South Dakota, “Just think of the blessed future we hope to have when we get into our little home life. . . . I long for it with all my heart, and I want you to feel the rest of it now.”
Susan B. Anthony was puzzled in the beginning by the relationship between Anna Howard Shaw and her niece, not because she had not observed frequent romances between women in the movement or had not had her own movement romances, but because she thought the differences between them were huge, as Anna reported to Lucy. Susan had said, “I don’t understand it. You are a strong, self-reliant, energetic woman,” while Lucy, who was fourteen years younger than Anna, was “without experience” and a frail girl, it is possible too that Susan thought of the fleetingness of passion and worried for her niece. But Anna was reassuring about the steadiness of her commitment, as she wrote to Lucy: when she told Susan that “all I had was yours [Lucy’s],” Susan responded, “That is if you keep on caring for each other,” at which Anna insisted that her feeling would last a lifetime. Anna also defended her love by bringing Susan to agree with her assertion that “there is a good deal of a noble woman in Lucy.”
It did not take Susan Anthony long to accept the connection between her niece and her favorite suffrage lecturer. In most of her letters to them, she addressed them together; she acknowledged that they slept together; and she spoke of their relationship as though it were a marriage, writing to Lucy, for example, “We [the Anthonys] are so settled with the feeling that dear Miss Shaw has you in hand that we almost surrender our right to any part or lot in you altogether.” Ida Husted Harper, a fellow suffragist and friend of both Susan Anthony and Anna Shaw, claimed that Susan felt “the keenest pleasure” about the relationship between Anna and her niece.
Susan Anthony was right: there was a tremendous difference of personality and experience between Anna Shaw and Lucy Anthony. But Lucy was precisely the woman Anna believed she needed. As she put it in an early letter to Lucy, “I am thankful that out of all the world in my hour of need God brought you to me.” Lucy was also a suffragist, and at one point she attempted to become a booking agent for suffrage speakers, using her assistance to Shaw as a credential. But primarily Lucy was a housewife, to Anna’s great joy, and a perfect complement to Anna, who delighted in mowing lawns and fixing roofs but never in washing dishes. “I will teach you to be a useful man about the house as I am,” she once wrote to a friend, offering to instruct the woman in carpentry.
Once Anna and Lucy became a couple, Lucy contributed to the suffrage cause not only by acting as Anna’s secretary but, more important, by making Anna’s hectic life as a traveling lecturer and then as president of NAWSA easier by tendering support, stability, and the solace of the ever-burning home fires. Until she met Lucy, Anna felt that except for her two brief years with Persis Addy, she had never had a home. Many of the one thousand extant letters from Anna to Lucy dwell on their domesticity—especially on Anna’s deep longing to live with Lucy. In 1891, for instance, she wrote to Lucy from a lecture trip in Tennessee, “I wish I could let you see the inside of my love for you, but, better still, that you could know the depths of my trust and . . . [sic] I have had so many happy thoughts of that little house we are planning. It shall be yours to furnish just as you want it.” Once the home was procured, Anna’s letters became filled with joyful anticipation of returning home, loneliness for their home, weariness that could be cured only by being at home with Lucy.
Anna reveled in her triumphs as a speaker in her letters, but she was almost always certain to remind Lucy of how crucial she was to that success. It was the knowledge of Lucy at home—in the home they created together—that enabled Anna to do her work with peace of mind. “My dear, dear Balance,” she called Lucy. “If I am of any use under the sun,” she reminded Lucy after a particularly gratifying lecture tour, “it is because you have given me courage and hope, and the triumph of last week was due as much to you as to myself.”
Anna needed Lucy especially to rescue her from her dark nights of the soul. Just as the public’s view of Anna as grandmotherly was wide of the mark, so was the image of her as good-humored and easygoing. She was given to despair, which was greatly exacerbated by the now unimaginable difficulties of her roaming life as a suffragist star, which obligated her to be constantly hopping on and off trains and carriages, sometimes in the most primitive and unwelcoming parts of the country, for three decades. Her itinerant existence in the service of suffrage created a sense of anomie and perpetual exhaustion that cast her into deep depressions, which she battled against assiduously but not always successfully. A poignant letter to Lucy in 1892, written while Anna was campaigning in Kansas, suggests both her anxieties and Lucy’s crucial role as a dispenser of comfort:
The wind whistles around the house and the rain patters on the glass and I am alone. It seems as if all the world has left me and I am sad and lonely. . . . It is hard to live this homeless life with no hope of its ending. Year after year of constant toiling like a galley slave and no chance of release, and for what? Just merely to work to help others who do not want to be helped. It would be so easy to close one’s eyes, shut out the pain and sorrow of living, and sleep—such a long restful sleep that one would never grow tired again.
But she snapped out of her death wish by remembering that she was no longer alone in the world. “I wish we could just sit and not speak but rest and help each other to feel the peace of perfect trust,” she wrote. “I am thinking of the Haven,” the home she and Lucy were planning to build, which she anticipated as their marriage haven.
When a young woman whom Anna knew slightly committed suicide some years later, Anna identified with her, giving vent to those dark impulses that were always just beneath the surface, though kept in check by her stable lesbian relationship with Lucy. She wrote to Lucy that she understood well “what a lonely hopeless thing” life must have seemed to the dead woman. But once again, as she had throughout the years, she shrugged off her attraction to despair by remembering, “Well, we have each other, and a lot of good friends, and our beautiful home, and with all these things there is no limit to the good helpful work we may do. How glad I am that we both want to do it and that we are both able, in many ways, to do much.”
Despite the comfort of this relationship, however, Anna was susceptible to the attractions of other women. The loneliness she suffered during her constant sojourns in strange towns, strange hotels, and strange people’s homes may help to explain her infidelities with women such as Harriet Cooper, a Californian who was probably Anna’s lover during her 1895–96 suffrage trips to the West. This affair was clearly not an isolated incident. In an uncharacteristically catty letter to a suffragist friend, Carrie Chapman Catt revealed what was very well known about Anna Shaw in top suffrage circles by 1912. Mary Peck (who had a crush on Catt, and whom Catt called “Pan”) had apparently apprised her that Shaw had made unwelcome advances. Catt responded, “I was interested in the love story. Naughty Pan to kick up such a row! Smash hearts and I know not what. Yes I think A[nna] S[haw] is too old for that sort of thing now. It used to happen often—about every two years. You ought to understand how that goes.”
Regardless of Anna’s other romances, her relationship with Lucy continued for more than thirty years, until her death. The extant letters from Lucy to Anna are not as plentiful as Anna’s letters to Lucy, but Lucy’s assessment of their life together is poignantly preserved in what she wrote in Anna’s journal almost six months after Anna’s death. On the last page of the journal, which Anna had started at the beginning of the year, is this entry in Lucy’s handwriting: “December 31, 1919: On this the last night of the last day of the year which took away my precious Love—Her friendship and to serve her was the joy of my life. She was the most unselfish—the best friend one could have—In as much as I helped in her labors & to make her life easier perhaps—that much am I glad I have lived.”
As Anna Shaw believed, she could not have tolerated the tremendous pressure she endured decade after decade as lecturer and leader in the suffrage campaigns without the intimacy and nurturing of women. If she had been a traditional wife and mother, she could not have played the role she did in the suffrage movement. If she been heterosexual and unmarried, it would not have been easy to be intimate with men, since illicit heterosexual behavior was not widely tolerated in a movement that needed to appeal to a large conservative base in order to succeed. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the National Woman Suffrage Association had been the focus of outrage when they defended the free-love advocate Victoria Woodhull in the 1870s. Woodhull was often dubbed a prostitute for her views. Anthony’s and Stanton’s brief acceptance of her deepened the split between NWSA and the American Woman Suffrage Association, and for a time between the NWSA camp and all conservative women’s rights advocates. Shaw could push the suffrage cause to millions of people because her female lovers made a difficult situation tolerable to her, and her asexual, grandmotherly persona (as those outside the inner circles saw it) made her tolerable to the public.
To the Brink of the Nineteenth Amendment
Shaw’s greatest talents and successes in the suffrage cause were as an orator rather than as the leader of an organization. Though she excelled in diplomatic argument, she was much too impulsive and impatient with nitty-gritty details to be able to organize well, and she was too fiery to be able to deal in the subtleties of personal diplomacy. But in 1904, Susan Anthony urged Shaw to run for the presidency of NAWSA: “I don’t see anybody in the whole rank of our suffrage movement to [assume the position] but you. . . . We must not let the society down into feeble hands. . . . Don’t say no, for the life of you. . . . We must tide over with the best material that we have, & you are the best.” Shaw could not refuse such an appeal from her mentor and hero. She held the post from 1904 to 1915.
During that time NAWSA membership grew from 17,000 to almost 200,000, and after long years of stagnation, the suffragists chalked up victories in several states. In 1910 Washington voted for woman suffrage; in 1911, California; in 1912, Oregon, Arizona, and Kansas (“Oh, the joy of it! Day of days! Thank heaven, I had a little part in it! I can hardly keep still. I want to sing and praise God!” Shaw gloated in her journal after getting the election results on November 2, 1912). Before she left the presidency, two million American women in twelve states could vote, and the tide had shifted so that total victory seemed all but inevitable. Ida Harper observed that under Shaw’s leadership, the tone of the press had become “distinctly favorable” to woman suffrage, and everywhere prosuffrage audiences were huge, overflowing even the largest halls.
As disorganized an administrator as Shaw might have been, her contributions to those achievements were undeniable. She was a ceaseless campaigner; she was very successful in getting wealthy women to contribute significant sums, and NAWSA’s annual budget increased tenfold during her years in office; and she made numerous wise leadership decisions. She was truly skillful in manipulating public sentiment, and with that skill she unquestionably furthered the cause.
Her relationship with the militant suffragists’ Congressional Union, which was born under the leadership of two young women, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, after they had observed the militancy of British suffragists, is a case in point. Shaw was as impatient for woman suffrage as the most radical militant and was initially attracted to the youthful energy of Paul and Burns. But her deeper conviction, which had always been manifested in her speeches, was that the best approach was to allay the fears of the recalcitrant, who were already terrified by the uncontrolled potential of women that suffrage seemed to threaten. The militants’ approach exacerbated those fears. But Shaw knew how to use the militants to make her own brand of suffragism look less frightening. She made NAWSA into the “good cop,” whose sweet reasonableness became very appealing to politicians and the public, in contrast to the militants’ “bad cop” image. She used what she depicted as the extremism of the Congressional Union to emphasize the rationality of her own organization. “Votes for women were never obtained by militant methods. . . . Every victory for suffrage has been secured, even in England itself, by the orderly and constitutional procedure which has marked the agitation during the whole history of the movement in America,” she told magazine reporters in 1913, effectively reminding them that NAWSA had been “civilized” in its demands. These had better be taken seriously, because a “savage” group, the Congressional Union, was ready to resort to disruption and even violence and unpleasantness like that perpetrated by British militants—hunger strikes, burning of public buildings, and chaining themselves to monuments.
More justly, perhaps, the Congressional Union might be viewed as the grain of sand in the oyster that produced the pearl of great price, the treasured right to vote. Naturally Shaw could not acknowledge how essential the Congressional Union was to her strategy. Nevertheless, her tactical use of the radical group was brilliant: she succeeded in getting people who had once seen NAWSA as terrible in its demand for votes for women to understand how modest, patient, and thus meritorious the older organization was. In effect, she used the Congressional Union to redefine what was a moderate (though no less insistent) position on suffrage. The New York Times’s encomium to Shaw’s leadership after the amendment giving women the vote was passed sums up her strategy’s success: “[Anna Shaw’s] wise guidance of the woman-suffrage cause, a guidance which emphatically impressed upon the public mind that neither she nor the cause was responsible for the antics of the madwing, so-called militants, probably had as much to do with its triumph as anything that contributed to bring it about.”
Shaw and NAWSA were sometimes forced to engage in damage control because of the militants, but Shaw usually managed to gain a benefit from each potentially embarrassing situation the militants perpetrated. For example, in 1914 the Congressional Union announced that it would organize a campaign to defeat all Democratic candidates, because the Democrats were then in power and had failed to give women the vote. Shaw saw a major opportunity to play good cop on behalf of her organization. She widely denounced the union’s tactic, assuring those Democratic politicians who had been friends to suffrage that most women in favor of suffrage appreciated them and that female voters in suffrage states intended to work for their reelection.
She also helped convince President Wilson, a Democrat, that the suffrage cause merited serious support. Wilson had long been ambivalent but had begun slowly to bend toward women’s enfranchisement; however, he became hostile to suffragists when the Congressional Union obtained an audience with him by pretending to represent the Federation of Women’s Clubs, a national organization that had begun by encouraging women to read great books but had then turned its attention to social causes, especially the moderate promotion of women’s enfranchisement. Having thus achieved entry to the White House, the Congressional Union proceeded to trash the president. Shaw removed the sting of that shenanigan by denouncing it in the name of NAWSA, and thereby received Wilson’s gratitude and his commitment to suffrage as represented by women such as Anna Howard Shaw and the NAWSA women whom she led.
The suffrage cause was further helped by the stance NAWSA took toward the Great War. Initially Shaw opposed American involvement and called for explorations of alternative means to settle international disputes. But when it became clear that war was inevitable and that American women would be pulled in whether they wished it or not, she came to see this “war to end wars” as the sure and final means to get women enfranchised. Despite her early opposition to the war, she now pointed out that women in the combatant countries were helping the war effort by taking the places of men on farms and in factories, working in munitions plants, and running the railways, post offices, and hospitals. She made sure that no legislator could remain ignorant of these facts. Through NAWSA she reminded congressmen that if American involvement was indeed inevitable, the help of women would be crucial in the United States too—and that women would help best if they had the rights of full citizens.
Shaw was a pragmatist, just as she had been throughout her suffrage career. If war was really inescapable, she reasoned, and if women had to make the inevitable sacrifices that war demanded, then at the least they must finally emerge from their terrible experience with the long-sought, ever-elusive franchise.
In 1915 Shaw left the presidency of NAWSA, exhausted by squabbles and the effort of tending to the details of the job. But even out of office she continued to be a leading suffragist spokesperson, and in her lectures she now tirelessly insisted that in both peace and war, a modern country needed the cooperation of all its citizens, women as well as men. She never failed to draw a dramatic connection between what American leaders had presented as a sacred battle to make the world safe for democracy and the suffragists’ duty to continue their own sacred battle while they helped in the fight against the enemies overseas. Without resorting to unpatriotic rhetoric, she managed to suggest that America was as bad as the corrupt monarchies it fought if it denied half its citizens representation. She explained to the public that suffragists had to continue their agitation for the vote even during the war because “for years woman suffragists have been fighting for democracy, for those who submit to authority should have a voice in government. If we laid down this campaign we should be turning against democracy.”
She did not change her tactic even when President Wilson asked her, as one of the most famous and respected women in America, to serve as chair of the Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense in 1917. The Woman’s Committee was supposedly established as a clearinghouse to coordinate the war efforts of women’s organizations all over the country, but it was superseded or duplicated by various government agencies. When Shaw began to suspect that the Council of National Defense had intended her committee as a form of window-dressing, a sop to American women—as in “We take your war work so seriously that we’ve given you your own federal committee”—her first inclination was to resign. But she once again became pragmatic, believing that at least she had been given a government-sponsored podium from which she could make clear to all America that it was time women had the vote and that women’s role in the country must be expanded.
Speaking as the head of a federal committee, Shaw told her numerous audiences (hyperbolically perhaps, but nevertheless cleverly):
There are two million members of the suffrage associations of the United States. What would it not mean if by one just act of Congress two million women could be set free to serve the Government with singleness of purpose and undivided allegiance, and fired by a spirit of gratitude and loyalty, they should turn all their splendidly organized force, their initiative and ability for propaganda, into service to maintain the army in the field and to preserve the existing moral and spiritual as well as industrial forces in the States?
With every opportunity conceivable, she connected women’s efforts for America during World War I to their suffrage struggle, always reminding the United States of its indebtedness. “Our country needs the army of women at home just as much as the army of men in France,” she said over and over, in speeches, articles, and conversations with politicians. And the corollary of that fact was that women, as valuable citizens, must have the vote.
At the end of the war, Shaw became the first living woman to receive the Distinguished Service Medal, a reward for her service as the chair of the Woman’s Committee, in which she did not believe. But much more gratifying to her was the success of her ploy of constantly reminding America that women had earned the vote through patriotic service. After the seventy-year struggle for the vote, which had taken up more than thirty years of Shaw’s own life, Congress passed a constitutional amendment that enfranchised American women.
Anna Shaw was seventy-two years old at the end of the war. She had promised Lucy that once suffrage seemed assured and the war was finished, they would enjoy “wild oats for both of us in our own way the rest of our lives. We will have earned freedom from worry and can rest and go about the earth [or] stay at home, raise chickens and potatoes and enjoy the glory of our grove and Forest of Arden and the glorious sunsets.” When her work on the Woman’s Committee came to an end in March 1919, the two women were going to go to Europe, and afterward, Anna wrote to Lucy, “if we come home in the Fall we can go right to Florence Villa [where they had stayed during several vacations in Florida], What an easy time we might have of it next winter. We must get all there is in life for us the next few years. Don’t get run over or anything. Be careful of pickpockets.”
But Shaw had never been destined for an easy time. In May, before they could leave for their European trip, she was asked to share the podium with former president William Howard Taft on a three-week tour of the Midwest and New England in order to raise support for Wilson’s peace treaty and the League of Nations. “There is no other woman speaker before the public whose help [Taft] believes will be as valuable as yours,” the invitation said. She had spent her life as a vassal for pioneering challenges that would claim a place for women in the public sphere. How could she stop now? Against her better judgment, the exhausted Shaw accepted one last job on behalf of American women.
Halfway through the trip, in Springfield, Illinois, she became ill with pneumonia. She returned home to the woman with whom she had spent the last thirty years of her life. Under Lucy’s care, she rallied briefly but then sank again. The Nineteenth Amendment had gone to the states to be ratified by then, but ratification took until August 1920. With her death on July 2, 1919, Shaw missed knowing for certain that the cause to which she had devoted her best years had come to fruition; suffrage would finally be guaranteed to all American women through an amendment to the United States Constitution.