Pauline Agassiz was born in
Neuchâtel, Switzerland on February 6, 1841. Her father was the Swiss naturalist
Louis Agassiz. In 1850, she moved with her family to
Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her father was a professor of zoology and geology at
Harvard University. 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. In 1860, at the age of 19, Pauline married
Quincy Adams Shaw. They had five children: Pauline, Marian, Louis Agassiz Shaw, Sr., Quincy Adams, and
Robert Gould II. Married to a wealthy investor from a well known
Boston Brahmin family, Pauline Agassiz Shaw used her newfound wealth and social status to help Boston's poor. At the time, thousands of mostly Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants had moved to Boston's
North End, many of them poor, unskilled, and non-fluent in English. To provide them with job training, she co-founded America's first trade school, A strong advocate of women's rights, she served as president of the
Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government for 16 years, and supported the ''
Woman's Journal'', a weekly suffrage newspaper. She and her husband also advocated for prison reform. 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. She is featured on two walks given by the Jamaica Plain Historical Society: The Monument Square tour which passes the plaque memorializing one of her first kindergartens and the Jamaica Pond tour which passes her home on the shores of the Pond. == References ==