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Anna Howard Shaw
The Work of Woman Suffrage
By TRISHA FRANZEN UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03815-0
CHAPTER 1
The Development of a Dissenter (1847–1870)
Born of an overworked mother burdened with the entire care of six children at a time when even for the well-to-do there were but few conveniences and little labor-saving machinery to lighten the load.... Can anyone wonder that mothers bore offspring wearied at birth, looked upon life without joy and filled early graves.... So I came into existence a tiny, underfed child, robbed before birth of the vigor and health which are the birthright of every human being.
Anna Howard Shaw faced an uphill battle from the start. She was born on St. Valentine's Day in 1847, in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in northeast England, the sixth child and the third daughter of a bankrupt Scottish family. While all members of such struggling families in the mid–nineteenth century faced bleak and limited futures, girl-children, if they survived, had even fewer opportunities. Most would see lives that reproduced their mothers' existences of the inevitable marriage, uncontrolled maternity, and domestic drudgery. Nothing in Shaw's background set her apart from the millions of other baby girls born to poor families. Nothing suggested that this child's life would not follow the expected course given her class, race, sex, and family—nothing except perhaps her will to survive. Yet, through some combination of factors, this one girl-child found other possibilities and created a different script for her life.
Certainly Shaw was born into a time of change. The old stone row house her family occupied at her birth was fewer than two hundred yards from where workers were finishing the great Newcastle Railway Station that would transform this expanding northern industrial center. Perhaps some spirit of this innovation of travel imprinted itself on her. Or perhaps she sensed her family's yearning for something else, something better. Although the Shaws could give this girl baby little in the way of material goods, they did instill in her a pride in her heritage. The stories of "fighting Shaws" of northern Scotland from her father's heritage and the Grants and Stotts on her mother's side who were religious dissenters and nonconformists may have inspired her to believe that she had the right to determine her own destiny.
Re-creating Shaw's early years is a challenge. While many of the middleclass girls who would be her colleagues years later in the suffrage and other struggles were encouraged to keep self-reflective journals, Shaw hardly had the leisure or inclination to sit and write. Her father, mother, and siblings, though literate, were too poor and too busy to leave personal documents, diaries, or even portraits. Little beyond public records, a few photographs, and Shaw's own recollections from later in her life provide documentation of her first twenty-three years. Certainly, by the time Shaw produced her autobiography, she was an accomplished speaker and storyteller who knew how to create a dramatic tale. As a result it is difficult to verify the accuracy of many of her stories.
We do know that the birth certificate from the General Records Office in Newcastle states that this child was named Ann Howard Shaw. She was called Annie by her family and most everyone else during her early life; the more dignified "Anna" came later. "Ann" probably came from one of her mother's sisters, but "Howard" remains a mystery. While there is a story still believed among some of her supporters that she took Howard as a middle name to suggest that she had been married (and the New York Times among other papers often called her "Mrs. Shaw"), the earliest record of her existence states otherwise. "Howard" was on her birth certificate. Neither older sister had such a distinctive middle name, nor are there any Howards in her known genealogy except a nephew born years later.
Whatever the explanation might be, it was quite a name for this infant whose welcome into this desperate family could easily be questioned. It is not that she wasn't loved—she remembered both of her parents with the great affection of a cherished child—but for her mother this was yet another birthing to survive and, if so fortunate, from which to recover. By the time of Anna's birth, the Shaw family was already on a downward spiral from a promising, if marginal, middle-class position, where they had been able to give their children educational opportunities and a modest home, to a bleak and hungry life in a few dark crowded rooms. In 1847, Thomas and Nicolas (a feminine Scottish name, accent on the second syllable) Shaw already had five children: Eleanor, James, Thomas, John, and Mary.
Thomas Shaw (1813–1895) was born in Radcliffe, near Manchester, in Lancashire. His class status is hard to determine. Anna's autobiography tells us that her paternal grandfather had been a "gentleman" who had squandered the family's resources and abruptly died, leaving the widowed Eleanor Robinson Shaw to raise her two sons. The younger son, Thomas, trained in the wallpaper embossing trade. Though Anna provides little background on her father's immediate family or her father's early life, she proudly traced his paternal family back to the Shaws of Rothiemurchus and their stern castle on the island of Loch-an-Eilan in the northern Highlands. These Shaws migrated to England in the hard times that hit Scotland in the 1690s, but the specific journey of Anna's ancestors is lost. Records suggest that Thomas's mother, Eleanor Robinson, was born and raised in Alnwick, Northumberland.
Shaw's most quoted description of her father succinctly captures her views of him: "Like most men, my dear father should never have married." She goes on to remark on his sweet and thoughtful nature but notes that he was so idealistic that he was irresponsible in practical matters. Although his youngest daughter portrayed Shaw as a failed patriarch, he was fondly remembered by others as extroverted, gregarious, and intellectual. He loved to read to others and was a master storyteller who could captivate and hold an audience—hints of the source of his daughter's great talent. A Big Rapids, Michigan, newspaper, many years later, commented on his presence at a wedding reception, stating that his "genial face and ready wit made fun for all." A photograph of his Civil War Company captured an image of a serious and dignified officer, and the photograph in Shaw's autobiography shows a man still handsome at eighty.
In contrast to her silence on her father's family, Shaw wrote at length about her mother's family, honoring her maternal grandmother as a righteous and heroic dissenter. Anna's grandmother, Nicolas Grant, had married James Stott of Ellingham, a parish of seven hundred and forty people located eight miles north of the Northumberland country seat, Alnwick. Soon after, the Stotts settled in Alnwick, a medieval town of cobblestone streets and city gates dominated by Alnwick Castle, home of the Duke of Northumberland for seven hundred years and now famous as the Hogwarts in two Harry Potter films. Alnwick was and is in the borderlands between England and Scotland. It is north of Hadrian's Wall and only thirty miles south of the current boundary of Scotland. James Stott first appears on the public records of the militia for 1798. The church records from this period document various Stotts as active leaders within the town's many nonconformist or dissenting churches.
Anna's grandfather, James Stott, was a driver of the royal-mail stagecoach between Alnwick and Newcastle, a position that gave him a lower-middleclass status in that era. Starting in 1798, Nicolas and James had seven children, including her namesake, Nicolas, who was born in 1810. While the children were still quite young, James Stott died in a stagecoach accident. In an era before regularized social welfare, his widow and their children became part of Alnwick's "Established Poor," who received a weekly allowance from the town coffers. Nicolas also received a position at Alnwick Castle.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, these hardships, Nicolas Grant Stott was an independent thinker and activist. Unitarian at a time when such believers could not legally follow their faith, Widow Stott adamantly refused to pay tithes to support the Church of England. Consequently local tax collectors confiscated a portion of her belongings each year in what became a ritual that the entire community observed. From this, her resistance to intolerance, Nicolas Stott became an inspiration and role model for her granddaughter.
As a result of her father's death and her mother's subsequent employment at the castle, Nicolas and her siblings entered the Duke's and Duchess's schools where "attendance ... was dependant [sic] on a parent being an employee of the estate." The Duchess's school, founded in 1808 by Duchess Julia three years before the Duke's school opened, emphasized "needlework, along with the basics of reading, writing and mathematics" for the young women in its charge. At this school, the younger Nicolas not only gained a basic education, but she also mastered the skills of the seamstress, one of the few positions open to women. She would call on this training at a number of crucial points in her life and pass her skills on to her daughters.
None of the ambivalent feelings that Anna had toward her father clouded her memories of her mother. Throughout her life Anna practically canonized the women she loved; her mother and grandmother were the first among these women. To her youngest daughter, Nicolas Shaw was as beautiful in spirit as she was in appearance. The line drawing of Nicolas Stott at eighteen in Shaw's autobiography shows a delicately pretty, dark-haired young woman. Though physically frail—a semi-invalid by the time her family settled in Michigan—she was, to Anna, the powerful emotional foundation of the family. While Anna's father was by tradition and law the head of the family and its intellectual leader, Nicolas Shaw was the one who had to temper the dreams of her impractical husband and stretch whatever resources they had to ensure meeting the material needs of the family. Anna saw the great physical and psychological burdens her mother and other women bore, giving her a deep knowledge of the significance of all the types of unrecognized work that women did. In spite of the hard life she led, Nicolas Shaw also passed to her children an optimist's view of the world. Anna wrote that she benefited from "the cheerful and brave spirit inherited from my mother, who rarely ever lost courage or loosed her hold on a sunny, hopeful disposition."
Anna leaves no story, romantic or otherwise, about how her parents met. She simply states, "My father and mother met in Alnwick, and were married in February 1835." Though Nicolas Stott and Thomas Shaw were "dissenters," their marriage had to be registered in the Church of England. It is listed in the records of St. Andrew's Church, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, on entries of the last day of January, 1835.
The 1841 British census has the Shaws as residing on Blenheim Street in the Westgate section of Newcastle, the oldest "suburb" of the city, up from the River Tyne and outside the ancient city walls. With Thomas and Nicolas were their first three children—Eleanor, 5; James Stott, 3; and John, known as Jack, 1, who had all been baptized at the Hanover Square Unitarian Chapel, a famous congregation whose records date back to 1752. Anna's paternal grandmother, Eleanor Robinson Shaw, lived close by on Westmorland St.
On this census Thomas is identified as a wallpaper embosser, yet soon he quit this trade. In spite of the political unrest of the 1840s that saw the Chartists riots and demands for electoral reform, the continuation of the Corn Laws and the positive economic outlook of this decade were enough to push Thomas to start his own business as a grain dealer. Unfortunately this was a case of bad timing. He had barely established his enterprise when the repeal of the Corn Laws that had subsidized the price of grain undercut his trade and brought about financial difficulties for the Shaw enterprise. By the mid-1840s, Thomas Shaw declared bankruptcy.
Forced to sell their home and most of their possessions and end their sons' educations, the Shaws began to look beyond Newcastle for a new beginning. The family first tried London, but the capital was no kinder to them. They returned to Newcastle where there were at least some extended family members for support. Finally, Thomas decided they should migrate to the United States, continuing his family's search for economic opportunity and religious and political freedom, but there could be no exodus until Thomas cleared his debts.
It was into this family, now at its lowest ebb materially and emotionally, that Anna was born, six years and two more children after the 1841 census. Anna was not a healthy infant. One can only imagine the state of Nicolas's health given their financial stress and the fact that she had birthed six children in twelve years. With the maternal and infant mortality rates of this period and the epidemics that swept Newcastle, the fact that the six children and their mother lived was remarkable. Throughout her life Anna would return to that fundamental question, wondering why she did survive. Yet it is also possible that she was more cherished and more indulged because she had to struggle from the start.
By 1849, Anna's family sensed that they were beginning to emerge from their Dickensian existence. Nicolas bore another child, Elizabeth Nicolas, in 1849, a birth that coincided with the end of the family's indebtedness. Thomas Shaw, with the help of his family, had succeeded in paying his creditors. Leaving his wife to care for their seven children, Thomas sailed for the United States. The 1850 U.S. Census locates Thomas working as a paperstainer and living in a boarding house in Lynn, Massachusetts.
Thomas may have found a new beginning, but his wife and children faced two more hard and sad years in Newcastle working to save enough money to pay for passage to the United States. The sterotypic image of nineteenth-century Newcastle as a dark and dank environment fits their lives. At fifteen, Anna's oldest sister, Eleanor, was a servant for a family on Blenheim Street, their old neighborhood. Nicolas is listed in the 1851 census as the "lodging housekeeper," while earning additional income by hand-sewing shirts for the local clergy. The Shaw family was sharing their quarters with Stott relatives, Arthur and Charles, as well as another family from Alnwick. While these cousins are listed as "scholars," none of the Shaw children were in school. This census report captures the strains and sorrows of their last months in Newcastle. Anna was again the youngest child since not long after Thomas left, the baby, Elizabeth, had died. Because she was a Unitarian, Nicolas had to travel back to Alnwick with the body of her baby on her lap to bury her; in Newcastle there was no place but a paupers' graveyard for a baby not baptized in the Church of England. Soon after, Anna's grandmother, the indomitable Nicolas Stott, passed away.
Before the family could turn their faces and their hopes westward, they endured one final wrenching separation. Thomas Shaw was his mother's only surviving child. The elderly Eleanor Shaw couldn't accept the idea that she wouldn't see him or any of his family again. On the night before the group was to leave for Liverpool, she hid two of her grandsons in a hollowed out tree close to her home. Even when they were discovered, their paternal grandmother clung to them.
In August 1851, Nicolas Shaw and her six children boarded the Jacob A. Westervelt in Liverpool, bound for New York for what was to be a seven-week passage. So horrendous was this transatlantic voyage that Anna dreaded ocean travel for the rest of her life. Any journey across the Atlantic for steerage passengers in the middle of the nineteenth century meant misery—the crowding, the food, the sanitation, the sea, and the weather. On the Westervelt, the Shaw family faced the additional challenge of a storm so strong that the ship lost all its power and needed to be towed back to Queenstown (Cork), Ireland, for repairs. Yet this trip also found the young Anna working and singing with the sailors who doted on her. This is an early hint of Shaw's lifelong ability to tolerate, even find some respite in, the hardships of travel and the first indication that she was at least as much of an extrovert as her father.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Anna Howard Shaw by TRISHA FRANZEN. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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