CANTIDAD:

900

RESUMEN

Pauline Agassiz Shaw (Feb. 6, 1841- Feb 10, 1917), philanthropist, educator, and women’s suffrage leader, was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, the youngest of the three children of Louis Agassiz, a geologist and professor of natural history, and Cecilie Braun, an artist. In 1850, two years after her mother’s death, she moved with her older sister Ida and brother Alexander, the eldest sibling, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where in 1847 her father had been appointed head of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University and would serve as professor of Zoology until his death in 1873.

Pauline was homeschooled by her father and stepmother Elizabeth Cabot Carey, who married her father in 1852 and who Pauline later referred to as a “true mother” who inspired her intellectual curiosity and passion for women’s education (Hoffman, 362). Her intellectual development was also spurred by the many Boston and Cambridge intellectuals, including Longfellow, Thoreau, and Emerson, who were frequent visitors to the Agassiz home. But there were few formal educational opportunities for women at that time; her step mother would co-found Radcliffe College for Women in 1879. Aged 19 she married Quincy Adams Shaw, a 35-year old financier from a prominent Boston Brahmin background with whom she had five children: Pauline, Marian, Louis Agassiz Shaw, Sr., Quincy Adams, and Robert Gould II. As founder, along with Pauline’s brother Alexander Agassiz, of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, Quincy’s Shaw amassed a fortune from mining copper in the Midwest that made his family one of New England’s wealthiest and financed the couple’s extensive philanthropic and reform activities.

Agassiz Shaw was a pioneer of early education in New England. In 1877 she opened kindergartens in Brookline and Jamaica Plain and with energy, vigor, intelligence —and money— revived what had been a flagging kindergarten movement before she intervened. By 1883 she was supporting 31 kindergartens in greater Boston. Many of them were housed in public schools, but the Shaws were responsible for financing the effort, while Pauline’s assistant, Laliah B. Pingree, developed curriculum. In 1888 the city of Boston began its own publicly financed program of kindergartens, beginning with 14 of Agassiz Shaw’s schools. Keenly aware of the problems of Boston’s growing immigrant population and to provide alternatives to lives of crime and poverty she founded day nurseries that also provided evening classes. By the 1890s these had evolved into full service settlement houses —the first in New England— that provided recreation facilities, libraries, and classes on citizenship education.

Vocational education was central to Agassiz Shaw’s efforts, beginning with the North Bennet Street Industrial School, the first American trade school, she cofounded in Boston’s North End in 1881. Bennet Street provided classes in wood- and metal working, printing, and cooking and was followed in 1888 with the city’s first Sloyd Training School, which drew on a Scandinavian model of teaching practical subjects popularized in the U.S. by Gustav Larson. The Sloyd schools would train a generation of woodworking and technical teachers across the nation.

As a champion of progressive education, Agassiz Shaw was prominent in her support for the special Harvard Summer School for Cuban teachers in 1900. As well as donating $900 to fund the School, she funded a course of lectures on kindergarten education, arranged for practical demonstrations of the Sloyd woodworking method, and invited the Cuban visitors to tour the Bennet Street Industrial School. These events, which Agassiz Shaw attended in person, proved highly popular among the Cuban teachers who recognized their practical utility; the needs of the island’s emerging education system for a largely working-class population were quite similar to those of European immigrants to Boston. She was also a prominent figure at the many social events surrounding the Cuban visit, sometimes accompanying President Charles Eliot and often with her stepmother Elizabeth Cabot Carey Agassiz and her sister Ida Higginson, whose husband was Henry Lee Higginson, the leading benefactor of the Summer School.

In her final decades Pauline Agassiz Shaw continued her philanthropic efforts despite bouts of ill health. She became more active in the peace movement and the campaign for women’s voting rights, cofounding the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government in 1901 and serving as its president and chief financial supporter. She was also prominent in supporting women’s suffrage efforts in the American West, where several states extended the right to vote before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed that right, nationally, in 1920. She would not live to see the fruition of her suffrage work, however. She died of pneumonia at her Jamaica Plain home in February 1917, a few days after her 76th birthday. At her memorial service in Faneuil Hall Boston a few months later, Harvard’s President Eliot eulogized her deep interest in “concrete teaching… and the scientific method of thought.” (Tributes Paid, 30).

Further Reading.

A small collection of Pauline Agassiz Shaw’s papers is archived at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1. Blodgett, Geoffrey. “Shaw, Pauline Agassiz,” Notable American Women, Volume III: P-Z. (1971).

2. “Enthusiastic Cubans,” Cambridge Chronicle, 28 July 1900.

3. Hoffman, Norma. “Pauline Agassiz Shaw, 1841-1917: A Forgotten Visionary,” Affilia, Vol. 15 No. 3, Fall 2000 360-368

4. Pauline Agassiz Shaw: Tributes Paid her Memory at the Memorial Service held on Easter Sunday, April 8, 1917 at Faneuil Hall, Boston. (1917)

5. Obituary: Boston Transcript, Feb. 10th, 1917.