Born: 6 February 1841, Switzerland
Died: 10 February 1917
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Pauline Agassiz
The following is republished with permission from the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail. It was written by Bonnie Hurd Smith.
In 1881, when Pauline Agassiz Shaw (1841-1917) founded the North Bennet Street School to train primarily European Jewish and Italian immigrants in skilled trades, Boston’s North End was home to thousands of recent immigrants who crowded into the neighborhood’s tenement houses in search of a better life.
The once fashionable neighborhood of the 1600s and 1700s had by the mid-1800s become an over-crowded place for mariners and those employed in the maritime trades. In the following century, the promise of jobs in the newly industrialized America brought the Irish, Portuguese, Polish, Armenians, European Jews, and Italians to the North End. Philanthropists and social reformers like Pauline Agassiz Shaw, Helen Osborne Storrow (Paul Revere Pottery), and Lina Hecht (Hebrew Industrial School) responded by establishing organizations where immigrants could receive education, training, and services. The North Bennet Street School—America’s first trade school— today holds an international reputation for courses in fine furniture, architectural restoration, violin making, furniture, and carpentry.
Pauline Agassiz Shaw was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, to the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz and his wife Cècile Braun; both families were known for their scientific and artistic achievements. Pauline she was the youngest child, and adored by her parents. Sadly, when Pauline was seven years old, her mother died and she and her siblings were sent to live with relatives in Switzerland for two years. In 1850, they were reunited with their father in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he had accepted a professorship at Harvard. In Cambridge, Pauline completed her education, and in 1860, at the age of nineteen, she married Quincy Adams Shaw, a wealthy investor in copper mines. The couple resided on a spacious estate in Jamaica Plain, and “summered” on Boston’s North Shore at Pride’s Crossing.
As Pauline Shaw’s five children were born, she naturally took an interest in their education and wished to apply the best methods for their instruction. Finding Boston educational offerings lacking, she established a school at 65 Marlborough Street, which was a pioneering institution of modern, progressive, well-rounded education. With her husband’s financial backing and support, she expanded her efforts to care for children and families throughout Boston.
As George C. Greener stated during her memorial service in 1917, “In deciding the education of her own children Mrs. Shaw moved in almost untrodden and pioneer paths of teaching. With her broad mind and wide outlook the next step was to consider thoughtfully how the facilities at their command met the needs of the less fortunate children. She found their curriculum inadequate, and ill fitted to prepare them for the highest citizenship. Education to them was a meaningless drill, bearing no relation to real life … with full comprehension of and with no criticisms for the existing systems, she understood that educational experiments are the function of private enterprise, rather than of public institution … this experimental work appealed strongly to Mrs. Shaw and for thirty-five years she was the mainspring of this work at North Bennet Street.”
Pauline Agassiz Shaw is responsible for institutionalizing kindergartens in the Boston Public Schools. While Elizabeth Peabody first introduced Freidrich Fröebel’s German philosophy of “kindergartens” to Boston, Pauline Shaw funded fourteen kindergartens in Boston during the 1880s. In 1887, the Boston School Committee accepted responsibility for her programs, gradually adding more.
Pauline Shaw also funded day nurseries where poor and working women could leave their children in a safe, clean environment during the workday. She opened the first one in 1877 in connection with one of her kindergartens. Seven more followed in 1879 and 1880. In a tribute during her memorial service, Adeline Moffat explained Pauline Shaw’s motivation: “From the first, her rare, constructive mind saw beyond the confines of the nursery into the worlds of the little ones when they should leave hospitable care. Education of the child and of the mother and of the community became at once an integral part of the plan … the aim has been not only to provide for the care and training of the children in the kindergarten method but to reach the home through the influence of the work and the visiting of the matron in them.” In connection with the nurseries, classes in nursing, hygiene and temperance were offered, along with those in sewing, cutting, and mending.
Pauline Shaw now expanded her social service efforts by opening neighborhood houses in Boston and Cambridge where whole families received services. In some cases, these institutions evolved out of her day nurseries. They welcomed all members of the communities where they were located. As Robert A. Woods described during her memorial service, “No racial distinctions were ever registered in connection with any of her enterprises. Her insistence upon this principle has been the means of preserving neighborhood unity and loyalty even across the color line.” One of these neighborhood houses continues to operate today in Cambridgeport as the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House.
Even though Pauline Agassiz Shaw did not live to see women achieve the right to vote, she was a fierce supporter of woman suffrage. As Maud Wood Park wrote about her, “she became convinced that the equality of women before the law was indispensable to social progress that should be permanent.” Pauline Shaw served as president of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government for sixteen years, an organization she founded, once directing her members, “Let us enter this new year of work united and happy in the coming together again for the fulfillment of our pledges of the past, united in the sure hope of realizing the form of government which Lincoln has immortalized by the words, ‘Government of the people, for the people, and by the people,’ which at last is really by the whole people.”
Pauline Shaw believed that women’s active involvement in government would help ensure world peace. “The two great causes in the world to-day are the peace movement and equal suffrage,” she once said. “They are independent, but suffrage will help to establish more quickly the overthrow of the war system.” The year of her death, 1917, brought an end to World War I, but not, unfortunately, an end to war.
Pauline and her husband took an interest in prison reform, for “the broken, the hopeless, the abandoned,” reformer Maud Ballington Booth once explained. “In my work within dark, gray walls, Pauline Agassiz Shaw has been my greatest help and inspiration, and it is through her generosity and that of Mr. Shaw, that comfort and help, and a new start and a new home have been brought to tens of thousands of men whom the callous world looked upon as outcasts.”
Pauline Agassiz Shaw’s memorial service was held on Easter Sunday, 1917, at Faneuil Hall in Boston. An estimated 2,000 people attended, including David Walsh, the Governor of Massachusetts, and Charles W. Eliot, the former president of Harvard, to pay tribute to a pioneering woman whose “expectation of good from the untried, social work, kindergartens, day nurseries, manual training, prevocational and industrial classes now enrich and broaden the lives of our young people,” George Greener eulogized. “Life to her was large and broad and her ideas have spread across the country … she never regarded her work as completed.”
The following is republished from the National Park Service. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Known for her generous philanthropy, Pauline Agassiz Shaw invested in education, immigrant communities, reform groups, and women’s suffrage. Supporting more than 30 schools in addition to social service institutions in the Greater Boston area, Shaw “put something better than money into her work: she put her heart and soul into it.”
Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on February 6, 1841, Pauline Agassiz lived with her parents, Louis Agassiz and Cecile Braun, and two older siblings, Alexander and Ida. Following the death of her mother in 1848, Pauline and her siblings stayed in Switzerland with relatives while their father lectured in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Harvard College and the Lowell Institute. In 1850, the Agassiz children ultimately moved to the United States to be with their father, following his appointment as a professor at Harvard. Pauline finished her schooling in Cambridge.
At nineteen years old, Pauline Agassiz married Quincy Adams Shaw on November 30, 1860. Quincy Adams Shaw led Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, which operated copper mines in the Midwest. Working with Pauline’s brother, Alexander Agassiz, Shaw built a copper mining empire from the region’s abundant natural resources and the labor of hardworking Michigan miners. Shaw soon became one of the richest men in Boston. The Shaw family’s amassed wealth allowed Pauline to start and support charitable institutions in Boston.
Pauline Agassiz Shaw began her work in education reform by financially supporting Elizabeth Peabody’s school, the first English-language kindergarten in the United States. She became invested in kindergarten education, opening two charity kindergartens of her own in Jamaica Plain and Brookline in 1877. Schools in other places around Boston shortly followed, and she financed every aspect—supplies, salaries, and maintenance. Between 1882 and 1889, Shaw supported 31 different schools, spending more than $200,000 doing so. In 1888, Shaw successfully persuaded the Boston School Committee to make an investigation into a public kindergarten system. Shortly thereafter, as a result, they integrated 14 of her kindergartens into the Boston Public School system. A pioneer of children’s education, Shaw became “known as the foster-mother of the Kindergarten system of Boston.”
Additionally, Shaw wanted to help parents and pre-school aged children by opening and supporting day nurseries. The first started in 1877 along with her kindergarten, and others soon followed. Shaw saw great value in holistically supporting families; her kindergartens also held Mothers’ Meetings and Parents’ Clubs.
In addition to supporting education for the youngest of society, Shaw worked on initiatives for industrial training. Shaw’s Industrial School at North Bennet Street in Boston’s North End opened in 1881. Her institutions had no limitations—her work provided the large, working-class immigrant community with essential job training. The North Bennet Industrial School introduced innovative educational methods such as Sloyd training, a handicraft-based education from Sweden. Shaw later opened another training school dedicated to the practice.
Shaw continued to aid Boston’s immigrant community at a time when the city maintained one of the largest ports for immigration to the United States, second only to Ellis Island in New York. Opened in 1901, Shaw’s Civic Service House provided essential social services to newly arrived Jewish, Italian, Irish, and Polish immigrants in the North End. One of many settlement houses that she established, the Civic Service House helped families as they sought “a foothold on new soil.”
While her other work supported women in many ways, Shaw only entered the suffrage movement in the 1890s after being invited to a suffrage meeting in Brookline. She quickly became the largest financial contributor to the Massachusetts suffrage cause and also financed suffrage efforts in Western states. Her donations helped save The Woman’s Journal from ceasing publication multiple times. Additionally, Shaw funded Maud Wood Park’s international travels to study women across the globe.
As Shaw supported key suffrage organizations through her philanthropy, she also worked behind the scenes as a leader in Boston’s suffrage movement. Alongside Fanny B. Ames, Mary Hutcheson Page, and Maud Wood Park, Shaw organized the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government (BESAGG) in 1901. She became its first president and served in the position for 16 years.
In 1902, Shaw wrote a letter to be read at a Massachusetts Legislative hearing on equal suffrage. In it, she passionately called on true gender equality:
Men and women are trying to find a way that shall lead to the greatest welfare of both. How can that be done without mutual cooperation and mutual service in public matters as well as private? Gentlemen, we need more of a man’s service in the home, and we need the ballot for woman to complete public service, for all private service in the end must lead to public service, or the service of mankind.
Shaw’s overwhelming commitment to public service connected all her work across social reform movements.
After contracting pneumonia, Shaw passed away on February 10, 1917, at her home in Jamaica Plain. On the Easter Sunday following her death, Bostonians honored her life and work during memorial services held at Faneuil Hall. Maud Wood Park spoke about Shaw on behalf of her devotion to the suffrage cause. Park reflected:
In our work, as in her other activities, she had a far-seeing vision combined with an extraordinary attention to details. She eagerly shared in every feature of our work, never excusing herself from the smaller services because they were small, nor because of the heavier burden that she was carrying. While she had the power to see forward to the thing that was going to develop into something useful, she had the other power of communicating her spirit to others and making us all wish to follow and be like her.