She passed away in July 1919 at the age of 72, only a year before the 19th Amendment was finally adopted - realizing her lifetime dream.Mr. She was on the stump for the League to Enforce Peace when she fell ill while giving a speech in Springfield, Illinois. Until the end, Shaw remained a public speaker. It was an expedient move, an accommodation to racism that is hard to digest - a shameful part of her story, but not the whole story.Īnd in May 1919, she spoke at the NAACP’s National Conference on Lynching in Carnegie Hall, arguing that if women had the vote, lynching would be easier to stop. Shaw did not hesitate to play the race card when trying to draw the critical support of Southerners to the women’s suffrage cause. Like so many of her fellow white suffragists, she’s an imperfect role model for today. The controversy subsided - and after the war, Shaw resumed full-time traveling and lecturing for the woman’s vote. Do you think it would have been possible for them to choose me for that position if I had made any disrespectful reference to the American flag, or if in any way I had show a disloyal attitude toward the Government? I made this statement in the presence of several members of the President’s Cabinet at a great public meeting where Senators and members of Congress were also present, and it was after this speech that I was selected by the President and the Council of National Defense as the head of the Women’s Committee. In her own defense, Shaw released a public statement:Įverybody who knows anything about me or about woman suffragists knows very well that if I said the flag was “but a piece of bunting,” I said it in such a connection that that part of the sentence extracted from its context is worse than a deliberate falsehood. They lifted her passage out of context: “What is the American flag but a piece of bunting?”īecause she was the head of a governmental defense committee, the accusation was potentially damaging to her credibility - and the war effort. The anti-suffragists tried to discredit her with a smear campaign, circulating the charge that she had ridiculed and insulted the American flag. It is not visible to the human eye, but it is to the human soul.īut not everyone approved. It is because you and I see in that piece of bunting what we see in no other. It is a piece of bunting, and why is it that, when it is surrounded by the flags of all other nations, your eyes and mine turn first toward it and there is a warmth at our hearts such as we do not feel when we gaze on any other flag? It is not because of its artistic beauty, for other flags are as artistic. In many of her them, she would include this passage, to make a patriotic point about the great flag and the American values it stood for: In addition to her strategy and organizational work, she crisscrossed the country, delivering speeches for the woman’s vote. In 1890, the National American Woman Suffrage Association named Shaw their national lecturer, and in 1904 she became NAWSA’s president. In 1886, she began her public speaking career in support of the Temperance movement and woman’s suffrage. Shaw was one of the most powerful women’s suffrage leaders and speakers, with the unusual background of both a theological and a medical degree. It’s also a day to remember the woman’s rights speaker Anna Howard Shaw, who once found herself under attack because of her words about the American flag. Today is Flag Day - the day we commemorate the adoption of the Stars and the Stripes by the Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1777.