Born in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, on February 14, 1847, Anna Shaw was brought to the United States in 1851. She grew up in New Bedford and Lawrence, Massachusetts, and from 1859 on an isolated frontier farm near Big Rapids, Michigan. The absence of her father, the nervous breakdown of her mother, and the illness of an elder brother forced twelve-year-old Anna to undertake clearing the land, planting crops, finishing the poor cabin, and caring for the family. She received a year or two of schooling, which she supplemented with omnivorous reading on her own, and at fifteen she became a teacher in a frontier schoolhouse. At the end of the Civil War she moved to the home of a married sister in Big Rapids and enrolled in the local high school.
Shaw became active in the Methodist church, preached her first sermon in 1870, and was licensed to preach in 1871. In 1873 she entered Albion College, where she worked her way through two years of studies. In 1876 she entered the divinity school of Boston University, from which she graduated in 1878 after two years of nearly desperate poverty. In October 1878 she took charge of a church in East Dennis, Massachusetts. Her application for ordination (her license did not permit her to administer sacraments) was refused by the New England Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church and then by the General Conference, which took the further step of revoking her license. Finally, in October 1880, she was granted ordination by the Methodist Protestant Church. While ministering to her East Dennis Methodist congregation and also to a nearby Congregational one, she undertook medical studies in 1883 at Boston University. She resigned her pastorates in 1885 and became a lecturer for the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association.
In 1886 Shaw received her M.D. degree from Boston University. She did not practice medicine, however, but instead turned to the professional lecture platform in 1887. Temperance and woman suffrage were her principal themes, and she was inevitably drawn into the organized movements for those reforms. From 1888 to 1892, at the request of Frances Willard, she headed the Franchise Department of the Woman╒s Christian Temperance Union. A meeting with Susan B. Anthony in 1888 led her into the work of the National Woman Suffrage Association. In 1891 she became national lecturer for the merged National American Woman Suffrage Association, and from 1892 to 1904 she was vice-president of the organization. During those years she traveled and lectured indefatigably, and she was accounted the most eloquent and moving orator in the suffrage cause. Disappointed in not succeeding Susan Anthony as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association 1900, she did succeed Carrie Chapman Catt in 1904 and held the post until 1915. Her shortcomings as an administrator and as a political strategist contributed to the schism of militant suffragists led by Alice Paul in 1914 and the formation of the rival Congressional Union.
In April 1917, on the entry of the United States into World War I, Shaw was named chairman of the Woman╒s Committee of the United States Council of National Defense. Her work in that post busied her until March 1919 and earned her the Distinguished Service Medal in May. She then intended to return to the lecture circuit on behalf of the pending suffrage amendment, but former President William Howard Taft and President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard prevailed upon her to exercise her oratorical skills instead in the cause of President Woodrow Wilson╒s League of Nations plan. In the midst of a highly successful speaking tour she fell ill, and she died at her home in Moylan, Pennsylvania, on July 2, 1919.
