Anna Howard Shaw was born in England on February 14, 1847. When she was four years old the Shaw family moved from England to America, where they lived in Massachusetts. In 1859 they settled in the wilderness of Green Township, Mecosta County, near Big Rapids, Michigan. They lived on an isolated, rundown farm that required much work before it would become productive. After living there only a short time, her father left her mother and the children alone on the farm and returned to Massachusetts to work. 12-year-old Anna cared for the farm by clearing the land, planting crops, and finishing off the cabin along with caring for the family.

At the age of fifteen she began to teach school in a frontier schoolhouse. Eventually she went on to attend high school in Big Rapids, Michigan and then on to study at Albion College. She earned a degree in theology from Boston University in 1878. She was the second woman to graduate from Boston University School of Theology, but she was refused ordination by the New England Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church and received ordination by the New York Conference of the Methodist Protestant Church in 1880, becoming the first woman to be ordained in any branch of Methodism. While serving in East Dennis, Massachusetts in the Wesleyan Methodist Church, Anna continued her education and earned a medical degree from Boston University. When she was thirty-nine years old she began to speak out for social justice concerns, organizing and lecturing throughout the world for the causes such as temperance, peace, and women’s rights. During her lifetime she gave more than 10,000 lectures worldwide.

In 1892, when Susan B. Anthony became president of the newly formed National American Woman Suffrage Association, Anna became vice president. In 1904, Anna became the president of the NAWSA. Throughout this time frame she was a well-known figure in demonstrations, conferences, congressional hearings, and lecture circuits.

Unlike many suffragists who were accused of being "manly", Anna Shaw has made an effort to construct and maintain a traditional feminine look and persona. She believed that "no woman in public life can afford to make herself conspicious by an eccentricity of dress and appearance. If she does so she suffers for it herself, which may not disturb her, and to a greater degree, for the cause she represents, which should disturb her." But while Shaw crafted her appearance to conform to her concervative audience's standard of decorum, it was a superficial concession. She was a forceful and dynamic public speaker at a time when virtuous women were supposed to be demure and silent. She was powerfully assertive when passivity was the norm for women.

Shaw was originally opposed to America's involvement in WWI. However, once she realized that this involvement was inevitable, she used every opportunity to connect in public's mind women's efforts for America in WWI to their suffrage struggle. She constantly reminded America that women had earned the right to vote through patriotic service. In 1919, after the seventy-year struggle for the vote, which had taken up more than thirty years of Shaw's own life, Congress passed a constitutional amendment that enfranchised American women.

When Anna Shaw's work on the Woman's Committee came to an end in March 1919, she was planning to go to Europe with her long-time friend, Lucy Anthony. But in May, before they could leave Shaw was asked to share the podium with former president William Howard Taft on a three-week tour to raise support for president Wilson's peace treaty and the League of Nations. "There is no other woman speaker before the public whose help [Taft] believes will be as valuable as yours," the invitation said. Halfway through the trip, Shaw became ill with pneumonia. She returned home to Lucy Anthony's care.

The Nineteenth Amendment had gone to the states to be ratified, but ratification took until August 1920. With her death on July 2, 1919, Shaw missed knowing for certain that the cause to which she had devoted her best years had come to fruition.