Anna Howard Shaw

Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, in 1847, she moved to the United States as a child and grew up in difficult frontier conditions in Michigan. She later studied at Albion College and at Boston University, where she earned degrees in theology and medicine. Those achievements were remarkable for the time, and they helped shape her reputation as a woman determined to enter fields that often excluded women.

She was one of the first women ordained as a Methodist minister in the United States and also worked as a physician, but she is remembered most for her leadership in the fight for women's voting rights. Working alongside major suffrage figures such as Susan B. Anthony, she became a leading voice in the National American Woman Suffrage Association and served as its president from 1904 to 1915. Her speaking style and national organizing work made her a central figure in the movement.

Later in life, she also chaired the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense during World War I, for which she received the Distinguished Service Medal. She died in 1919, just before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, but her long years of organizing and public persuasion helped prepare the way for that victory.