Her own church refused to ordain her — then revoked her license to preach for asking. She got ordained anyway, added a medical degree, and went on to help win American women the vote. Meet one of Methodism’s most remarkable daughters.

Reviewed by the Beaverton First UMC editorial team · Fact-checked July 2026

Anna Howard Shaw’s life reads like three biographies stapled together: frontier survivor, pioneering pastor, suffrage leader. She was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, in 1847, crossed the Atlantic with her family at four, and at twelve found herself on an isolated frontier farm near Big Rapids, Michigan — where her father’s absence, her mother’s breakdown, and her brother’s illness left a child to clear land, plant crops, finish the half-built cabin, and hold a family together.¹ With a year or two of schooling and a stack of borrowed books, she made herself a teacher by fifteen.¹

Called, licensed — and then un-licensed

Faith came first, before the fame. Shaw became active in the Methodist church as a young woman, preached her first sermon in 1870, and was licensed to preach the next year.¹ She worked her way through Albion College, then through the divinity school at Boston University, graduating in 1878 as the only woman in her class.¹ She took charge of a church in East Dennis, Massachusetts — a working pastor in everything but title.

The title was the problem. Her license did not permit her to administer the sacraments — baptism and Communion — so she applied for ordination. The New England Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church refused her because she was a woman. She appealed to the denomination’s General Conference in 1880, which not only refused her and fellow candidate Anna Oliver but revoked her preaching license altogether.¹

Her church’s answer was not just no — it took back the yes it had already given.

Shaw’s answer was to find a church with more imagination. In October 1880 the Methodist Protestant Church — a smaller branch of the Methodist family — ordained her at Tarrytown, New York, making her its first woman minister.¹⁴ She went back to her congregation at East Dennis and served there for years, adding a second, Congregational flock nearby — and then, because apparently pastoring two churches left spare time, she commuted to Boston University’s medical school and earned an M.D. in 1886.¹

From the pulpit to the picket line

Ministry among struggling families — and her medical work — convinced Shaw that sermons alone would not fix what was broken for women. In 1885 she resigned her pastorates and gave herself full-time to the causes of temperance and women’s suffrage.¹ She became one of the movement’s greatest orators — by many accounts its single best speaker — and, alongside Susan B. Anthony, one of the chief leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, serving as its vice president from 1892 and its president from 1904 to 1915.¹ She spoke in every state of the Union.¹

During the First World War she led women’s home-front war work, and in 1919 received the Distinguished Service Medal.¹ She died in July of that year — weeks after Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women the vote, and a year before the states ratified it.³ She had spent five decades preaching a country toward its own promises and did not live to see the last one kept.

Why her story matters here

Shaw’s preaching and her politics were not two careers; they were one conviction. The faith that put her in a pulpit — that every person bears God’s image and deserves a full voice — is the same faith that put her on lecture platforms for fifty years. That thread runs all through the Wesleyan tradition: conviction becoming action, from Wesley’s fight against the slave trade to a Methodist preacher helping win half the country the vote. It is also why a church like ours says plainly that women belong in the pulpit — because we have seen, in lives like hers, what the church loses when it says no and what the world gains when it says yes. The church that turned Shaw away took another 76 years to grant women full clergy rights; this year marks the seventieth anniversary of that step.²

Questions people ask

Was Anna Howard Shaw the first ordained Methodist woman?

Not quite — Helenor M. Davisson was ordained a deacon in 1866, and Pauline Williams Martindale an elder in 1875, both in the Methodist Protestant Church. Shaw, ordained in 1880, was among the first and by far the most famous.²

Was she a doctor or a minister?

Both. She earned her M.D. from Boston University in 1886 while pastoring two congregations — one of the first women in America to hold both credentials.¹

Did she live to see women vote?

Almost. She died on July 2, 1919, after Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment but before ratification in August 1920.³

Shaw’s tradition of women preaching with conviction is alive and well — including here. You are welcome to come see for yourself on a Sunday.