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 ePilogUe Anna Howard Shaw and Women’s History History matters, but, as we well know, history doesn’t just happen. Over the many years of researching Anna Howard Shaw, I 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—that is, when our scholarship didn’t ignore her entirely. In the end, this book argues that knowing Anna Howard Shaw’s life is important for our history.1 It has been a long struggle to bring Shaw’s story front and center. First, while Susan B. Anthony clearly had passed on to her niece, Lucy, a keen awareness that the women who had led the long fight for women’s rights and suffrage would have to be responsible for writing its history, Lucy died frustrated that she had not been able to bring into print the story of the woman she called her “precious love.” This problem was compounded by the fact that, as other suffragists wrote their versions of the movement, those who knew and valued Shaw’s contributions remained silent. Consequently, certain perspectives, especially those of Alice Paul and her Congressional Union/National Women’s Party colleagues and those of the anti-Shaw insurgents , especially Mary Gray Peck, stood relatively unquestioned. Both camps greatly influenced Eleanor Flexner, who, in turn, became the foundational source for the post-1960s scholarship. Even as the last decades of research has brought impressive breadth and depth to our understandings of women’s rights activism, the strategies of the National Women’s Party have continued to capture the popular imagination while Flexner’s views have dominated the scholarly analyses.2 It is wonderful on one level that these portrayals of certain events and individuals have captured the imaginations of contemporary students, writers, and filmmakers and have renewed interest in the U.S. suffrage movement. On the other hand, when such works appear as conclusive, as if the story of women’s struggle for the franchise is fully known, the process of assessing Shaw’s place (and many others’) in that history and her contributions to the expansion of women’s rights has been in part a fight to keep open doors that are quickly closing. This closing is especially ironic knowing that Shaw’s story had greater cultural currency before the resurgence of women’s history.3 Such concerns drove me to want to produce the book on Anna Howard Shaw, of course. Shaw has shadowed my life. For twenty years I have worked in the building at Albion College where Shaw lived as a student. Her name is on the door to my office; images of her are on the walls. She lived most of her adult life in my hometown of Philadelphia and frequently visited the campus where I first studied as an undergraduate. It is getting to be an old joke, among my students, family, and colleagues, that I can relate anything and everything to Anna Howard Shaw. Yet as I complete this manuscript, my hopes are more modest. I hope this biography will interrupt the repetition of questionable conclusions about Shaw and her leadership and inspire us to ask more questions about Shaw, suffrage, and late nineteenth and early twentieth century womanhood. After all this research and analysis, I am left with my own questions about her and her contributions. If this volume increases interest in Shaw and the suffrage movement and spurs more research on both, it will have made a contribution.4 There is more to Shaw’s story than fits into this biography. There are more sources—generous colleagues forward Shaw-related finds to me regularly. There are other aspects of Shaw’s work that need examinations. No doubt some historians will question the conclusions of this volume and Shaw’s significance. But just having that debate will be a major step forward. What is left is considering what we gain from studying Anna Howard Shaw’s life. On a very basic level, Shaw’s life reminds us of the complexity of history. Although having a compelling and accessible narrative is great, it can’t be at the expense of a full examination of the best data and a thorough application of relevant feminist theory. Feminist theory demands at its most basic level the consideration of all aspects of privilege, all aspects of oppression, and all the intersections and interactions among these...

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