Background
Ellen Gates Starr was born on March 18, 1859 in Laona, Illinois to Caleb Allen Starr and Susan Gates Child.
Ellen Gates Starr was born on March 18, 1859 in Laona, Illinois to Caleb Allen Starr and Susan Gates Child.
From 1877 to 1878, Starr attended the Rockford Female Seminary, where she first met Jane Addams.
Forced to leave school due to financial concerns, Starr taught for ten years in Chicago. Starr joined Addams on a tour of Europe in 1888. 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 and 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 and on her return she established a bookbindery class at the settlement house in 1898 and established an arts and crafts business school.
She also sought to bring the Arts and Crafts movement to Chicago. In 1894, she founded the Chicago Public School Art Society with the help of the Chicago Woman’s Club.
The goal of the organization was to promote public school and an appreciation of beauty as a sign of good citizenship.
Starr was the president of the society until 1897 when she went on to found the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts. Starr was also active in the campaign to reform child labor laws and industrial working conditions in Chicago. 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.
She practiced her preachings about community labour to the extent of traveling to Britain to learn bookbinding. 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. Even after that, her work in campaigns against child labour met with much opposition from inside the Church.
In 1929, she had an operation to remove a spinal abscess where complications caused her to be paralyzed from the waist down.
Starr died at the convent on February 10, 1940 in Suffern, New New York
She was a member of the Women"s Trade Union League and helped organize striking garment workers in 1896, 1910, and 1915.