Pauline Agassiz Shaw was an American philanthropist and social reformer.
Background
Pauline Agassiz was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland on February 6, 1841. She was the youngest child of Cecile (Braun) and Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz. She lived with her grandmother from the death of her mother in 1848 until she joined her father at Harvard College in 1850.
It was in the United States, her father remarried Elizabeth Cabot Cary, co-founder of Radcliffe College. Her step-mother was a huge influence on Pauline's life.
As she grew up, her father formed the habit of inviting the more intimate companions of herself and her sister to his library for an afternoon each week, and she continually met his distinguished friends. She also assisted in the school for girls that her step-mother conducted in their home.
Career
When she was eighteen she accompanied her father on a trip to Europe, where he was entertained by scholars in England and France.
Both before and after her husband's death in 1908 she interested herself in various philanthropies. She did not use the fortune acquired by her husband merely to support long accepted types of educational and social service; instead, she was an educational and social pioneer, who saw the possibilities of some form of education that was too new and unproved to be supported by public funds. Thus she supported more than thirty kindergartens in and near Boston, after the school committee of Boston had, in September 1879, discontinued for lack of funds the public kindergartens established by the efforts of Elizabeth Peabody and others.
By 1887 she had organized the kindergartens so fully and had so thoroughly demonstrated their usefulness that the school committee consented to reconsider the question. It examined her kindergartens, decided to reestablish public kindergartens in Boston, and accepted fourteen kindergartens she had been supporting, together with the furniture and materials required in the instruction. She gave similar support to the manual training movement during its experimental period.
After 1883 she provided the funds to give free normal instruction in various manual arts to teachers of the public schools and to support children's classes of manual arts in the public schools as well as in her North Bennet-Street Industrial School. Finally, in 1894, the school committee provided for manual training as a regular part of the school work.
She also financed the Vocation Bureau of Boston, where Frank Parsons initiated work in vocational guidance, being its only annual contributor from March 1908 to June 1917, when the bureau was taken over by Harvard University.
She died in 1917.
Achievements
Pauline Agassiz Shaw opened day nurseries, settlement houses, and other establishments in Boston to help new immigrants and the poor. She was a co-founder America's first trade school, the North Bennet Street School, supported many other philanthropic and civic works, such as the Ruggles Street Neighborhood House, the Civic Service House, and the North Bennet-Street Industrial School.
The Pauline Agassiz Shaw Elementary School in Boston is named in her honor. She is memorialized at two different sites on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail, one on the North End Walk and another on the Jamaica Plain walk.
Views
A strong advocate of women's rights.
Personality
She developed the charm and lovable personality that were to characterize her through life.
Connections
On November 30, 1860, she married Quincy Adams Shaw, president of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company. He was the traveling companion and friend to whom Francis Parkman dedicated his California and Oregon Trail (1849) and was one of the first Americans to recognize the merits of the French landscape painters and to buy their works, particularly those of Millet. They had five children.
