Ellen Gates Starr

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

Social reform work Starr joined Addams on a tour of Europe in 1888. After her return, she established a bookbindery class at the settlement house in 1898, followed by an arts and crafts business school.

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. 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.

Personal life Relationship with Jane Addams 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". 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. 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. 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.

Later life 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. 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.

After eight years as an invalid, Starr died at the convent on February 10, 1940.

In media In 2016, St. Hyacinth Basilica Elementary in Chicago's Avondale neighborhood, which had closed in 2014, 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.

Selected works (1896) Settlements and the church's duty (n.d.) Reflections on the breviary