biography
| sex:
| female
|
| lived:
| (1847–1919)
|
| biography:
| Reformer, minister, and physician, born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Tyne and Wear, NE England, UK. She came with her family to the USA in 1851. Her father, an impractical reformer, built a crude log cabin in the Michigan frontier (near Big Rapids) and put his family there in 1859, and the young Anna had to learn many traditionally male skills to help the family survive. She obtained an education in a local high school but early felt a ‘call’ to be a preacher, and with the support of a local Methodist woman she began to preach (1870). In 1876 she went to Boston University from which, after great economic trials, she took her certificate (1878). She became a minister in a Methodist church in East Dennis, MA (1878–85), and after considerable trouble was ordained in 1880. Meanwhile, she decided she could do more good for women as a doctor, and she went to Boston University's medical school, taking her MD in 1886. In 1885 she also became a lecturer and organizer for the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, leaving that post (1887) to become a freelance lecturer. In 1888–92 she worked with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Urged by Susan B Anthony to put her talents as an orator to work for the suffrage movement, in 1891 she became a national lecturer for the newly united National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), becoming vice-president (1892) and president (1904). During her decades with the suffrage movement, she became one of the most prominent and eloquent workers for the cause, but she was not a good administrator and gradually a younger generation of women grew restless at the NWSA's failure to offer a strong strategy and leadership. When she resigned from the presidency of the NWSA (1915), she was somewhat relegated to the sidelines of the suffrage movement, but she worked hard during World War 1 to co-ordinate women's activities in the war effort and continued to speak out for woman suffrage. She died just as she was about to set out on a speaking tour in support of President Woodrow Wilson's peace treaty at the League of Nations. |
|
|
