Ellen Gates Starr | |
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 Starr in 1914 | |
| Born | March 19, 1859 Laona, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died | February 10, 1940 (aged 80) Suffern, New York, U.S. |
| Education | Rockford Female Seminary |
Ellen Gates Starr (March 19, 1859 – February 10, 1940) was an American social reformer and activist. [1] With Jane Addams, she founded Chicago's Hull House, an adult education center, in 1889; the settlement house expanded to 13 buildings in the neighborhood.
Ellen Gates Starr was born on March 19, 1859, in Laona, Illinois, US, to Caleb Allen Starr and Susan Gates (née Child).
From 1877 to 1878, Starr attended the Rockford Female Seminary, where she first met Jane Addams. After being forced to leave school due to financial concerns, Starr taught for ten years in Chicago. [2]
Starr joined Addams on a tour of Europe in 1888. [2] While in London, the pair were inspired by the success of the English Settlement movement and became determined to establish a similar social settlement in Chicago. When they returned to Chicago in 1889, they co-founded Hull House as a kindergarten, then a day nursery, an infancy care centre, and a center for continuing education for adults. In 1891, Starr created the Butler Art Gallery as the first addition to the Hull mansion. She travelled to England to study with the famed bookbinder, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson. [3] After her return, she established a bookbindery class at the settlement house in 1898, followed by an arts and crafts business school. [4] [5]
She also sought to bring the Arts and Crafts movement to Chicago. In 1894, Starr founded the Chicago Public School Art Society with the help of the Chicago Woman's Club. The goal of the organization was to provide original works of art and good quality reproductions, to promote public school learning and an appreciation of beauty as a sign of good citizenship. Starr was the president of the society until 1897, when she founded the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts. [4] [5]
Starr was also active in the campaign to reform child labor laws and industrial working conditions in Chicago. She was a member of the Women's Trade Union League and helped organize striking garment workers in 1896, 1910, and 1915. However, by belief she was firmly anti-industrialisation, idealizing the guild system of the Middle Ages and later the Arts and Crafts Movement. [6] She was arrested at a restaurant strike. In the slums of Chicago, she taught children who could not afford school education about such writers as Dante and Robert Browning.
Lillian Faderman argues that Starr was Addams's "first serious attachment". The friendship between the two lasted many years, and the two lived together. Addams wrote to Starr, "Let's love each other through thick and thin and work out a salvation". [7] The director of the Hull-House Museum at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Lisa Lee, has argued that the relationship was romantic and a lesbian one. [8] Brown agrees that the two can be regarded as lesbians if they are seen as "women loving women", although there is no evidence they were sexual partners. [6] [9] The intensity of the relationship dwindled when Addams met Mary Rozet Smith (who had been Starr's student at Miss Kirkland's School). These two women subsequently set up home together. [6]
Starr joined the Episcopal Church in 1883. By 1894, she was a member of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, an Episcopal women's prayer society that combined prayer with education and activism for social justice. Founded by Emily Malbone Morgan, the Companions included a number of influential reformers from around the United States, such as Vida Scudder, and Mary Simkhovitch. Companions came together each summer for a week retreat that allowed women reformers to reconnect spiritually, network with other reformers, and attend a series of educational programs on social issues. [10]
Although Starr possessed an interest in Roman Catholicism for many years, it was only in 1920, when she believed the Church was seriously teaching social justice, that she converted. Her work in campaigns against child labour encountered much opposition from inside the Church. [6]
In 1929, complications caused by surgery to remove a spinal abscess resulted in her becoming paralyzed from the waist down. [11] In 1931, seriously ill, Starr retired to a Roman Catholic convent in Suffern, New York, where she was cared for by the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. She was not a member of their religious community, nor any other. [12]
After eight years as an invalid, Starr died at the convent on February 10, 1940. [1]
In 2016, St. Hyacinth Basilica Elementary in Chicago's Avondale neighborhood, which had closed in 2014, [13] was used as the setting for Albany Park Theater Project's renowned immersive theater play Learning Curve. It was transformed as the play's "Ellen Gates Starr High School", named for the co-founder of Hull House. [14] [15]
Laura Jane Addams was an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, philosopher, and author. She was a leader in the history of social work and Women's suffrage. In 1889, Addams co-founded Hull House, one of America's most famous settlement houses, in Chicago, Illinois, providing extensive social services to poor, largely immigrant families. Philosophically a "radical pragmatist", she was arguably the first woman public philosopher in the United States. In the Progressive Era, when even presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified themselves as reformers and might be seen as social activists, Addams was one of the most prominent reformers.
Hull House was a settlement house in Chicago, Illinois, that was co-founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. Located on the Near West Side of Chicago, Hull House, named after the original house's first owner Charles Jerald Hull, opened to serve recently arrived European immigrants. By 1911, Hull House had expanded to 13 buildings. In 1912, the Hull House complex was completed with the addition of a summer camp, the Bowen Country Club. With its innovative social, educational, and artistic programs, Hull House became the standard bearer for the movement; by 1920, it grew to approximately 500 settlement houses nationally.
Julia Clifford Lathrop was an American social reformer in the area of education, social policy, and children's welfare. As director of the United States Children's Bureau from 1912 to 1922, she was the first woman ever to head a United States federal bureau.
Rockford University is a private university in Rockford, Illinois, United States. It was founded in 1847 as Rockford Female Seminary and changed its name to Rockford College in 1892, and to Rockford University in 2013.
The settlement movement was a reformist social movement that began in the 1880s and peaked around the 1920s in the United Kingdom and the United States. Its goal was to bring the rich and the poor of society together in both physical proximity and social connection. Its main object was the establishment of "settlement houses" in poor urban areas, in which volunteer middle-class "settlement workers" would live, hoping to share knowledge and culture with, and alleviate the poverty of, their low-income neighbors. The settlement houses provided services such as daycare, English classes, and healthcare to improve the lives of the poor in these areas. The settlement movement also spawned educational/reform movements. Both in the United Kingdom and the United States, settlement workers worked to develop a unique activist form of sociology known as Settlement Sociology. This science of the social movement is neglected in the history of sociology in favor of a teaching-, theory- and research university–based model.
Flora Dunlap was an American social worker and social reform activist in Iowa. She served as the president of the Iowa Equal Suffrage Association in 1913. She headed the Roadside Settlement House in Des Moines, Iowa. Dunlap was the first woman to ever serve on the Board of Education of Des Moines. She was a friend of Jane Addams and a supporter of the Women's Suffrage Movement.
The child-saving movement emerged in the United States during the nineteenth century and influenced the development of the juvenile justice system. Child savers stressed the value of redemption and prevention through early identification of deviance and intervention in the form of education and training.
The Music School Settlement for Colored People was a New York City school established and operated to provide music education for African-American children, who were generally excluded from other music schools. The school was founded in the memory of violinist and composer John Thomas Douglass.
Alzina Stevens was an American labor leader, social reformer, and editor, active in Hull House in Chicago. She was one of the representative women in the order of the Knights of Labor and an ardent advocate of equal suffrage. She served on the editorial staff of the Toledo Bee and was half owner and editor of the Vanguard, an organ of the People's Party. Although her marriage to Mr. Stevens in 1876 or 1877, ended in divorce soon after, she kept her husband's surname.
The Northwestern University Settlement House is an Arts and Crafts style house located at 1400 West Augusta Boulevard in Chicago, Illinois, United States. The Settlement Association was founded in 1891 by Northwestern University to provide resources to the poor and new immigrants to the West Town neighborhood. The actual Settlement House structure was built in 1901 by Pond & Pond. It was designated a Chicago Landmark on December 1, 1993.
Irving Kane Pond was an American architect, college athlete, and author. Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Pond attended the University of Michigan and received a degree in civil engineering in 1879. He was a member of the first University of Michigan football team and scored the first touchdown in the school's history in May 1879.
Enella Benedict was an American realism and landscape painter. She taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a founder and director for nearly 50 years for the Art School at the Hull House.
Dr. Cornelia De Bey was a Progressive Era reformer, homeopathic doctor, Chicago public school administrator, labor advocate, and leader in the women's suffrage movement. She worked with the famous Hull House community of social reformers, including Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, Alice De Wolf Kellogg, and Ellen Gates Starr. She advocated for major school administration reform, exposing corruption, advocating for more democratic decision-making, and defending the unionization of teachers.
Eleanor Sophia Smith was an American composer and music educator. She was one of the founders of Chicago's Hull House Music School, and headed its music department from 1893 to 1936.
Mary Rozet Smith was a Chicago-born US philanthropist who was one of the trustees and benefactors of Hull House. She was the partner of activist Jane Addams for over thirty years. Smith provided the financing for the Hull House Music School and donated the school's organ as a memorial to her mother. She was active in several social betterment societies in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century.
Mary Eliza McDowell was an American social reformer and prominent figure in the Chicago Settlement movement.
Eleanor McMain (1868–1934) was an American settlement house worker and progressive reformer in early-20th-century New Orleans. McMain served as head resident of Kingsley House, the largest and most influential settlement house in the American South, transforming Kingsley House into a focal point of progressive movements in the New Orleans area. Additionally she furthered women's causes at a time of suffrage.
Anna Wilmarth Thompson Ickes was an American politician and activist.
Clara Landsberg was an American educator. She was the leader of the adult education programme at Hull House, and was a close collaborator of Nobel laureate Jane Addams. She later taught at Bryn Mawr School with her lifelong friend Margaret Hamilton.
Helen Chadwick Thayer was an American suffragist and social reformer. A pioneer in the settlement movement era, she was a co-founder and president of the College Settlements Association (CSA). She was an alumnæ trustee of Smith College.
Miss Ellen Gates Starr, co-founder in 1889 with the late Jane Addams of Hull House in Chicago and associated with the institution for more than forty years, died here today in the Convent of the Holy Child, where she had been an invalid for eight years. She would have been 81 years old March 19.
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