„Women: This is Your Job!”. Słów kilka o aktywności Amerykanek w I wojnie światowej

Artykuł dotyczy udziału Amerykanek w wysiłku wojennym Stanów Zjednoczonych podczas I wojny światowej w świetle poczytnego magazynu „The Ladies’ Home Journal”. Od kwietnia 1917 r., w związku z wypowiedzeniem wojny Niemcom, ruch amerykańskich sufrażystek stanął przed nowymi wyzwaniami i zadaniami. Na fali powszechnego patriotycznego zrywu niektóre działaczki kobiece, m.in. z National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) uznały, że w zaistniałej sytuacji należy poprzeć politykę rządu. W ramach National Council of Defense powołano oddzielną sekcję – Woman’s Committe (Komitet Kobiecy), którą kierowała Anna Howard Shaw, znana lekarka i zasłużona sufrażystka, honorowa przewodnicząca NAWSA. W kolejnych miesiącach wojny Komitet Kobiecy korzystał z „gościnności” redakcji „The Ladies’ Home Journal” propagując na jego łamach zaangażowanie Amerykanek i ich wsparcie wysiłku wojennego Stanów Zjednoczonych. W artykułach i felietonach zachęcano do różnych form obywatelskiej i patriotycznej aktywności, m.in. poprzez akcję oszczędzania żywności (hooverize), prace charytatywne, zakładanie ogródków wojennych, pomoc farmerom w sezonie letnim, etc. Liczne apele kierowano do dziewcząt i kobiet, zachęcając do pracy w Amerykańskim Czerwonym Krzyżu oraz Youth Women Christian Association (YWCA), a także w Salvation Army. Czas wojny stworzył dla Amerykanek okazję nie tylko na zademonstrowanie zaangażowanego patriotyzmu, ale i szanse na wkraczanie wielu z nich w obszary aktywności i do zawodów zdominowanych przez mężczyzn.

Persuading the “Male Preserve”

This chapter focuses on men, the only empowered contingent of the suffrage movement. While some men had always voiced support for woman suffrage, no sustained men's organization existed in the state until 1908. That year, Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, encouraged the founding of the Men's League for Woman Suffrage, which then served as an affiliate of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. These elite white men, often raised or living in suffrage households, risked embarrassment and censure by publicly displaying their support for woman suffrage. As their participation became routine, the novelty of it wore off. These privileged male champions of woman suffrage inspired men of other classes—including urban immigrants and rural, upstate men—to reconsider their suffrage stance. This unique aspect of the suffrage coalition thereby played a lesser but crucial role in winning the vote for women.

Anna Howard Shaw and Women’s History

This chapter reviews Anna Howard Shaw's life and accomplishments, and presents some final thoughts. The author says that over the years of researching Anna Howard Shaw, she was driven by a quest to understand not only the life of this remarkable woman but also how women's history transformed this transgressive, irreverent pioneering woman into an incompetent and conservative leader. She argues that denying the immensity of Shaw's contributions to woman suffrage demands ignoring a great deal of documentation. Although one book and one view can hardly answer all the questions concerning Shaw's place in U.S. and woman suffrage history, hopefully this biography, by bringing new sources and new evidence into the discussion and by reframing the issues, has kept the inquiry open.

The Road to Independence (1871–1880)

This chapter describes events in the life of Anna Howard Shaw from 1871 to 1880. Shaw had a vision that God had called her to a larger life. However, with no independent means of wealth, her choices appeared to be limited to marrying or resigning herself to struggle along as an impoverished schoolteacher, living in her parents' home. To gain access to any formal education for herself, she would have to leave that home. At this point Anna turned to the only resource she did have beyond her own dreams, ingenuity, and determination—her sister Mary, who had married a successful entrepreneur. So it was that Anna made the difficult and seemingly selfish decision to leave her parents' home and move in with her sister to seek her options in the small town of Big Rapids, Michigan. On August 26, 1873, the Big Rapids District Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church enthusiastically licensed twenty-six-year-old “Annie Howard Shaw” as a local preacher. In June 1878 Shaw sailed for Europe. By then she had earned her education and possessed her first investments. This thirty-one-year-old daughter of impoverished immigrants returned to tour the great sights of the continent.

Finding the Cause (1881–1889)

This chapter describes events in the life of Anna Howard Shaw from 1881 to 1889. Over the course of the 1880s Shaw willingly gave up the comfortable but limited life of a small town minister to dedicate herself to changing the inequalities of the social structure in ways that she believed would better women's lives more than any work she could do as a minister. Fortunately for Shaw, she turned out to have many of the talents, skills, and attributes that the leaders and the constituencies of the woman suffrage and women's temperance movements needed and valued. By 1888, Shaw would state that, “I have registered a vow that I will from this time forth never work for any political party, never give one dollar to any religious body, home or foreign, never listen Sunday after Sunday to the preaching of any man, never give one ounce of my strength of body or purse, or mind, or heart to any cause which opposes the best interest of women. ” Fortunately, Shaw achieved the independence to make those decisions.

Facing Contradictions

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the life and accomplishments of Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919) as well as the author's account of how she became interested in Shaw. It then sets out the book's primary purpose, which is to provide a much-needed biography of a major figure in U.S. women's history. The book is also a historiographic mystery. How and why have so few historians taken an in-depth look at Anna Howard Shaw? Why is there no discussion of the fact that she was the first and only salaried president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association? And certainly the core question remains: how important was Shaw to the woman's suffrage movement? The chapter urges two core changes to Shaw scholarship. First we must consider what the sources actually tell us. The second is to open up the analyses and consider the possibility of other views of Shaw.

A Worker to the End (1916–1919)

This chapter considers the life of Anna Howard Shaw after her 1915 resignation from the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Official retirement, although at first it brought a lessening of her administrative responsibilities, in the end allowed Shaw the freedom to broaden her involvements. During these last years, much of the public, from the youngest suffrage supporter up to the U.S. president, saw her as an elder stateswoman, a role Shaw enthusiastically embraced. On February 14, 1917, Shaw celebrated her seventieth birthday. Close to two hundred letters, gifts, and congratulations from her long-time suffrage colleagues through President Wilson celebrated her life. On May 19, 1919, Shaw became the first woman to be honored with the Distinguished Service Medal, the government's highest civilian award. Shaw died on July 2, 1919.

Apprenticeship in the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1890–1903)

This chapter describes events in the life of Anna Howard Shaw from 1890 to 1903. In 1890, Shaw joined Susan B. Anthony and other suffrage workers in South Dakota for her first state suffrage campaign. Though the rigors of this campaign tested even Shaw's adaptability, at forty-three, Shaw was at her peak in terms of health and vigor. She embraced her new calling, her new pulpit, and her new form of ministry. She was quickly becoming the movement's new voice, a leader whose nonelite origins gave her a remarkable ability to translate women's demands into appeals understandable to a diversity of Americans. Her strengths as a speaker and the depth of her commitments to women's causes were put to the test here, but she toughed it out as a true daughter of the frontier.

The Development of a Dissenter (1847–1870)

This chapter details the early life of Anna Howard Shaw. Anna was born on St. Valentine's Day in 1847 to Thomas and Nicolas Shaw, 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. In 1849, her father Thomas sailed for the United States, and in August 1851 Nicolas and her six children boarded the Jacob A. Westervelt in Liverpool for what was to be a seven-week passage to New York. The family made their first American home in the old whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts. They then moved to a new mill town, Lawrence, in the North on the Merrimac River, which would be their home for the next seven years, during the nation-changing decade of the 1850s. When the Civil War started in April 1861, Anna's two brothers and father volunteered. At only sixteen, Anna shouldered the responsibility for her family's survival.