Pauline Elizabeth Augusta Shaw

Pauline Agassiz Shaw (1841 – 1917) was an American philanthropist and social reformer who opened day nurseries, settlement houses, and other establishments in Boston to help new immigrants and the poor. She introduced kindergartens to Boston's public schools, and co-founded America's first trade school, the North Bennet Street School. She was also a vocal advocate for women's rights.

From http://bwht.org/shaw

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’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.”