Anna Howard Shaw was born in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England. She was a descendant of English Unitarians. Anna's parents went to America when she was four years old, and after living for several years in Massachusetts they moved to the then unsettled port of Michigan, where Anna encountered the hardships of pioneer life.

Cut off from all school privileges, she took advantage of every book and paper that fell in her way. At fifteen years of age she began to teach, and continued for five years. Soon after she became a Methodist at age 24, her ability as a speaker was recognized. In 1873 the district conference of the Methodist Church in her locality voted unanimously to grant her a local preacher's license. It was renewed annually for eight years.

In 1872 she entered Albion College, Michigan, and in 1875 she entered the Theological department of the Boston University, from which she graduated with honors in 1878. During her last year of theological training she was pastor of the Methodist Episcopal Church of Hingham, Massachusetts. Her second pastorate was in East Dennis, on Cape Cod, where she remained for seven years.

During her pastorate in East Dennis she applied to the New England Methodist Episcopal Conference for ordination, but although she performed better on her examination than any candidate that year, her ordination was refused on account of her sex. The case was appealed to the general conference in Cincinnati in 1880, where the refusal was confirmed.

Shaw then applied for ordination to the Methodist Protestant Church and received it on 12th October, 1880, becoming the first woman to be ordained in that denomination. She supplemented her theological course with one in medicine, taking the degree of M. D. at Boston University during her pastorate.

Becoming more and more interested in practical reform, she finally resigned her position in East Dennis and became a lecturer for the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association. After entering the general lecture field and becoming widely and favorably known as an eloquent speaker on reform topics, she was appointed national superintendent of franchise in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.

At the urgent request of leading suffragists, she resigned her office in the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union and accepted that of National Lecturer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, of which she was elected vice-president-at-large in 1892. She was also president of Wimodaughsis, a woman's national club, of Washington, D. C.

Shaw spoke before many state legislatures and several times before committees in both houses of Congress. Among her most popular characteristics as a speaker were her keen sense of humor and ready wit, often enabling her to carry her points where logic alone would fail.

Social justice activist, and women's suffrage leader and speaker, by the time she stepped down as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1915, two million women in twelve states could vote.

Anna Howard Shaw died at her home in Moylan, Pennsylvania.

Though Shaw's correspondence with her life partner, Lucy Anthony, and with other women who were her lovers, suggests that she was what our era would describe as a stomping butch, her public persona was very different... She was a forceful, dynamic speaker at a time when virtuous women were supposed to be demure and silent... Shaw was convinced that if she presented herself as being as radical, as angry, and 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".

Source: http://www.gcah.org/women_ministry2.htm - et alii

Quote source: Faderman, L. Acting "Woman" and Thinking "Man": The Ploys of Famous Female Inverts, in "GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies" 5(3) pp. 315-329