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 cHAPter 8 A Worker to the End (1916–1919) Ihave been a slave all my days and I am not going to be so any longer. I am going to declare my freedom from bondage to meetings and all sorts of things that do not leave me a chance to find happiness in my life. We have both been hampered because of our work and because we have not had money enough. . . . When have I taken days off just for my pleasure? I have simply lectured and worked at my desk and I have not gone off to the mountains with friends or to the seashore or on motor trips or anywhere just for good times. I am going to do it and so are you. Over the course of her long working life, very few things stopped Anna Howard Shaw.1 Though illnesses plagued her from the time she was in her forties, Shaw generally would manage to stave them off to keep them from disrupting her schedule. On a number of trips to Europe, she spent days confined to her cabin with some malady. Most often she was able to get home to Lucy. Ironically, the peripatetic orator was most vulnerable to respiratory illnesses, ankle injuries, and headaches. The last were so common that Susan B. Anthony once remarked that a headache seemed necessary for Shaw to give her best speeches. Now, however, Shaw may have taken this ability to push through illnesses too far. For weeks at the end of her years as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association it looked as though Anna Howard Shaw indeed had given her life to the cause. Yet once again, Shaw pulled through, and the choices she made during the remainder of her life provide important insights into her character and the place she had in the public arena. 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.2 Shaw reached her beloved Alnwick Lodge before her pneumonia turned critical. During all her nomadic years, Shaw had written of her yearning to spend time at her home. Now, once the immediate crisis passed, she had no choice. As she regained some strength, she could look out over the winter landscape of the rural Rose Valley and her Forest of Arden, a grove that had grown from all those trees she had brought back from her suffrage travels. When she could finally leave the bed, she could move to her favorite space at the top of the stairs, which she and Lucy named “Peter Pan,” and its view of the ravine and the stream at its bottom. Alnwick Lodge represented all that Shaw had achieved since her hungry years in Michigan and Massachusetts. Under Lucy’s care, her will again triumphed over her compromised physical health, but this recovery was much slower and longer than any since 1895. Her recovery seemed stalled. Shaw was physically recovering for certain. Yet for many weeks, her spirit lagged. The spark was gone, and it wasn’t clear whether the veteran activist would ever be able to step into a public role again. The prospect of a limited life, of a well-earned though still self-indulgent retirement, actually appeared to be draining Shaw. For a woman who had always defined herself through her work, the demanding work of traveling and speaking, if she couldn’t continue to contribute to the fight for enfranchisement to which she had devoted her life, should she resign herself to her final and absolute rest?3 Lucy realized, perhaps more than Shaw herself, the depth of this internal struggle. Though part of the doctor’s orders forbade reading Shaw any of the many letters of concern that she had received, Lucy was worried, worried enough to finally disregard the doctor’s rule. She chose to read parts of one particular letter. It was the one from Carrie Chapman Catt.4 Over the years, these two great leaders, each respecting and admiring the other’s talents, had felt their closeness ebb as the movement’s political intricacies pulled them into competing alliances. Although Catt was an astute observer of Shaw’s personal and political limitations, she was also one of Shaw’s foremost...

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