Success Quote by Anna Howard Shaw

Shaw’s sentence is a relay race disguised as a compliment. She splits the world into two camps - “idealists” and “practical men” - then choreographs their partnership so the finish line lands where she wants it: social change that looks both visionary and inevitable. The phrasing is strategic. Idealists get the glamour of imagination (“dream and the dream is told”), but the authority to certify reality is assigned to “practical men,” who “bring back the truth” like explorers returning with maps. In an era when women reformers were routinely dismissed as sentimental, Shaw borrows the culture’s own hierarchy (male-coded practicality) to launder radical aims into something that sounds like common sense.

That subtext matters because Shaw was not merely praising teamwork; she was negotiating legitimacy. As a suffrage leader and one of the first ordained female Methodist ministers in the U.S., she understood that public persuasion often required dressing moral urgency in the language of progress, order, and “human life” as a shared civic project. Her long, cumulative sentence structure mimics the argument she’s making: a steady march from dream to deliberation to application, with “progress and growth” arriving as if they’re the natural byproduct of rational listening.

There’s also a quiet provocation inside the gendered framing. By naming “practical men” explicitly, she invites her audience to inhabit that role - and then implicitly asks why women, who have been doing the dreaming and the organizing, shouldn’t also be recognized as the ones who apply truth to life. The world “moves ever on,” she implies, whether the gatekeepers approve or not.