Ellen Gates Starr

Ellen Gates Starr
Starr in 1914
Born	(1859-03-19)March 19, 1859 Illinois
Died	Suffern, New York
Education	Rockford Female Seminary
Parent(s)	Caleb A. Starr Susan Gates Child

Ellen Gates Starr (March 19, 1859 – February 10, 1940) was an American social reformer and activist.

Biography

She was born on March 18, 1859 in Laona, Illinois to Caleb Allen Starr and Susan Gates Child.

She was a student at the Rockford Female Seminary (1877–78), where she first met Jane Addams. She taught for ten years in Chicago before joining Addams in 1888 for a tour of Europe. While in London, they were inspired by the success of the English Settlement movement and became determined to establish a similar social settlement in Chicago. They returned to Chicago and co-founded Hull House as a kindergarten and then a day nursery, an infancy care centre, and a center for continuing education for adults.

Faderman argues that Starr was Addams' "first serious attachment". The friendship between the two lasted many years, and the two became domestic partners. Addams wrote to Starr, "Let's love each other through thick and thin and work out a salvation". The director of the Hull-House Museum at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Lisa Lee, has argued that the relationship was a lesbian one. Brown agrees that the two can be regarded as lesbians if they are seen as "women loving women", although we do not necessarily have any evidence for genital sexual contact. The intensity of the relationship dwindled when Addams met Mary Rozet Smith, and the two women subsequently set up home together.

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. 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 . She practiced her preachings about community labour to the extent of traveling to Britain to learn bookbinding.

Although Starr possessed an interest in Roman Catholicism for many years, it was only when she believed the Church was seriously teaching social justice that she converted in 1920. Even after that, her work in campaigns against child labour met with much opposition from inside the Church. In 1931, seriously ill, Ellen Gates Starr retired to a Roman Catholic convent where she was cared for by the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, but she was not a member of their religious community, or any other.

She died at the convent on February 10, 1940 in Suffern, New York.

Selected works

• (1896) Settlements and the church's duty
• (n.d.) Reflections on the breviar