Since the inception of women's history, towering figures such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul have dominated scholarly and popular narratives of the women's suffrage movement. Therefore Trisha Franzen's biography of Anna Howard Shaw, the fourth president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), is a welcome and long-overdue shift in focus. A leader in the suffrage movement for over thirty years, the longest-serving and first salaried president of NAWSA, a committed advocate of peace, and a defier of many gender conventions, Shaw led an important life and, as Franzen notes, certainly deserves a prominent place in United States and women's history. Yet scholars have largely ignored Shaw or denigrated her contributions to American political culture. By drawing on previously unexplored or underutilized sources (most notably the collected papers of Anna Howard Shaw and Lucy E. Anthony), asking new questions from well-worn evidence, and refusing to accept older and largely unexamined interpretations of Shaw inherited from Eleanor Flexner's 1959 suffrage history Century of Struggle, Franzen successfully demonstrates how Shaw's life provides new insights into the suffrage movement and the permeability of turn-of-the-century gender norms.

Franzen divides her narrative into two major sections. The first four chapters trace the events of Shaw's early life, particularly her immigrant background and how she fought to rise from poverty and support herself through sewing, entering the ministry, and gaining a medical degree. The breadth and detail of these chapters are crucial to Franzen's argument that Shaw's later political consciousness, style, and strategies as a NAWSA executive grew from her early experiences. For example, Franzen illustrates in vibrant prose how Shaw's choices in these years “were a drastic departure from what was expected of women” and represented “a new script for a woman's life” (69). Determined to keep a speaking commitment, Shaw did not hesitate to cross a railroad trestle on foot over a swollen river or to outpace a pack of wolves in a sleigh as she fought to catch a train one snowy winter night. Her personal choices also defied gender conventions. Susan B. Anthony, her political mentor, and Anthony's niece Lucy E. Anthony, her partner for over thirty years, were at the center of her emotional life. Gender-variant in her personal and professional characteristics, Shaw was nevertheless a popular and successful member of her community, which, in Franzen's view, raises questions about “how widespread bifurcated gender ideals were among the general population” (7).

In the second half of her book, Franzen traces Shaw's history as NAWSA president and departs significantly from previous scholars who argue that Shaw's ineffective leadership produced internal conflict and organizational stasis. Franzen demonstrates instead that Shaw's presidency was not without its weaknesses but that the conflicts it produced were crucial to the transformation of NAWSA and the renaissance of the suffrage movement that occurred largely because of, not in spite of, Shaw's leadership. During her presidency, NAWSA transitioned from a voluntary association directed by volunteers to a professional organization with paid executives and a growing publicity department. In addition, the number of suffrage states tripled, and NAWSA saw large increases in funds and membership, particularly among working women, college students, and politicians. Perhaps most importantly, Shaw, an unwavering advocate of universal equal rights, managed to prevent the spread of influence within NAWSA of white southern suffrage leaders, who pushed the organization to support a qualified or educated suffrage position. In outlining the conflicts over racial issues within NAWSA, Franzen cautions against labeling as “racist” all white organized women. To do so, she notes, is to fail to distinguish among women who actively supported racial discrimination, those who ignored racial issues, and those like Shaw who tried, however inadequately and incompletely, to address racial inequality (191).

Franzen's biography does not answer all of the questions it addresses. More evidence is needed, for example, of how Shaw's life “uncovers the shifiting boundaries and weaknesses of the nineteenth-century sex/gender system.” But, as Franzen notes, “if this volume increases interest in Shaw and the suffrage movement and spurs more research on both, it will have made a contribution” (186). My guess is that it will do both.