Jennifer L. Bosch, “Ellen Gates Starr,” in Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical
Dictionary, ed. Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2001): 838-42.
STARR, ELLEN GATES
March 19, 1859-February 10, 1940
SETTLEMENT LEADER, LABOR ACTIVIST, SOCIAL REFORMER
Ellen Gates Starr was born in Laona, Illinois, the second daughter and third of four children of
Caleb Allen Starr, farmer and businessman, and Susan Gates (Childs) Starr, homemaker. The
Starrs, both of Deerfield, Massachusetts, were married in 1848 and moved to their farm, Spring
Park, near Laona, Illinois, in 1855. In 1877 Caleb Starr sold the farm and moved the family to
the neighboring town of Durand, Illinois, where he bought a pharmacy and lived out the
remainder of his life. Starr's father, through his grange activity, which emphasized democracy
and community action, and her aunt ELIZA ALLEN STARR, through her writings on European
religious art and her conversion from Unitarianism to Catholicism, influenced Starr's early
social, political, and religious development.
In 1877, with the assistance of her aunt Eliza Starr's personal contacts and moral support,
Starr enrolled at the Rockford [end page 838] Female Seminary, Rockford, Illinois. At
Rockford, Starr was exposed to the works of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Carlyle,
and John Ruskin. This literature, especially the works of Ruskin, had a major impact on her
developing artistic, social, and political philosophies. Her father could finance only Ellen Starr's
first year at Rockford, and in the fall of 1878 she left to become a teacher at a country school in
Mount Morris, Illinois. A year later she began teaching at the prestigious Miss Kirkland's School
for Girls in Chicago.
While at Rockford, Starr met JANE ADDAMS. Twelve years later the two friends
founded Hull-House, the Chicago settlement. Both women experienced periods of restlessness
while at college. They continued their friendship after Ellen Starr left school, through a
correspondence that detailed their self-doubts about their futures and their concerns about living
lives that lacked purpose and direction. Addams had confided to her friend her periods of deep
depression, her doubts about a career, and her early observations of the inequalities in the lives of
the rich and the poor. Starr had written Addams her wish that they "do some work together. I
believe," Starr wrote, "we should work well" (November 28, 1885, Starr Papers). By 1888 Starr
had taught at Miss Kirkland's for almost nine years and had not found her calling in life; Addams
was about to travel to Europe for a second time. The two friends traveled together, strengthening
their relationship and making more specific their plans to "live among the poor in the hopes that
some good might come of it" (Bosch, "The Life of Ellen Gates Starr," 35). Addams recalled that
Starr embraced the idea with "vigor and enthusiasm" (Forty Years at Hull-House, 87). On her
part, Addams visited Toynbee Hall, the pioneering social settlement situated in an East London
slum, while Starr went back to Italy to visit places of religious and aesthetic value. "Starr, more
than Addams, de- [end page 839] cided to become a settlement worker as a means of applying
her religious beliefs to some positive deed" (Bosch, "The Life of Ellen Gates Starr," 49).
Addams and Starr began their work at Hull-House with a statement of purpose that
outlined a general design. The new settlement was to "provide a center for higher civic and
social life, to initiate and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises and to investigate
and improve the condition in the industrial districts of Chicago" (Addams, Forty Years at HullHouse, 112). Hull-House opened its doors to its immigrant neighbors in September 1889.
The first successful endeavors of Hull-House were Starr's reading parties and art exhibits,
which evolved into formal educational programs and the establishment of the Butler Art Gallery,
built in 1891. In these programs and in the creation of an environment in which art could be
appreciated by the people of the neighborhood, Starr was implementing ideas about art's spiritual
and civilizing qualities shared by many reformers of her generation. Starr and Addams, along
with the founders of the Arts and Crafts movement in Chicago, believed that the dehumanizing
elements of industrialism harmed individuals and jeopardized the collective spirit of a people.
For democracy to flourish in industrial America, there had to be a resurgence of ethical behavior,
a sense of responsibility among different classes and groups. Art was capable of elevating the
goals of a society and, on the individual level, of developing the democratic spirit. From these
ideas it naturally flowed that Starr, combining her artistic and educational interests, formed the
Chicago Public School Art Society in 1894 for the purpose of placing works of art in classrooms
to improve the decor and to educate and inspire the children. At Starr's recommendation,
schoolroom walls were painted in cheerful colors to draw the interest of children back into the
room itself. Once this change was accomplished, works of art were placed in the rooms and
adjacent hallways depicting nature scenes, man-made structures, and portraits of prominent
Americans, such as Abraham Lincoln. Starr served as the society's first president until 1897.
Starr connected the arts and crafts to the fight for improved conditions for workers in
society. Believing with other reformers that industrialization had alienated workers from their
skills and crafts, she promoted the return of dignity to the worker with a revival of crafts. Starr
helped form the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts in spring 1897 and believed that handicrafts
should be taught to laborers to give them a renewed sense of purpose and pride in craftsmanship
as well as a greater understanding of the industrial process. Handicrafts and the Hull-House
Labor Museum thus became integral components of the settlement.
Taking her own lessons to heart, Starr left Chicago in 1897 to learn bookbinding from T.
J. Cobden-Sanderson in London. She returned to Chicago in 1898 and opened the Hull-House
bookbindery. This endeavor, however, attracted only a few students. Starr realized that training
interested persons in traditional crafts was not a solution to the systemic problem of lost
craftsmanship in an industrialized society. In the years to come, Starr, to her despair, also
realized that her own craft of bookbinding was producing a product that only the rich could
afford.
Hull-House provided Starr with a forum from which to launch both her artistic interests
and her growing labor concerns. Starr's exposure to the working-class neighborhood
surrounding Hull-House and to the philosophies of John Ruskin and William Morris influenced
her involvement in Chicago's labor struggles. She moved beyond the arts and crafts approach,
however, and became involved with unionism and the weapon of the strike as a way to achieve
justice for laborers. Starr astutely summed up the ideal conditions for the laborer or artist as
being "perfect freedom from pressure of personal necessity, combined with a wholesome degree
of obligation to the service of others, beautiful surroundings, health and joy" ("Art and Labor,"
Hull-House Maps and Papers, 167). To achieve the minimum standards of life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, Starr took to the picket lines and joined workers in their struggles for better
wages, shorter hours, and safe working conditions. Starr, a quiet, petite, frail woman who was
not hesitant to stand firm against injustice, participated in labor strikes from 1896 to 1915. She
collected milk funds to feed strikers' children, housed union members, picketed (for which she
was often arrested), and wrote articles to promote public support and sympathy for the strikers.
Early on, Hull-House became identified as sympathetic to the unions, as it sponsored
meetings for all types of workers. Hull-House served as the meeting place for the shirtmakers,
organized in 1891, and the cloakmakers, organized in 1892. Residents like FLORENCE
KELLEY were influential in helping pass labor legislation, such as Illinois's first Factory
Inspection Act in July 1893, as well as child labor legislation. Starr's first known participation in
Chicago's labor movement came with the garment workers' strike of 1896. The clothing cutters
and tailors protested against their low wages and poor working conditions. Starr and other HullHouse residents took up collections to help feed the workers and their families.
After 1896 she became more concerned with women workers. Her approach to the
problems of industrial evils, the persistence of inequality, and the exploitation of wage laborers
(especially women and children) by a capitalist class began to depart from that employed by
Addams and other Hull-House residents. Philosophically, Starr turned to identification with the
oppressed workers and a change in the ownership of property; she worked for a socialist
solution. Addams, concerned with the relationship of the classes to each other in the context of
the American capitalist system, promoted the expansion of the role of the state in the
amelioration of abusive industrial conditions, the protection of women and children, and the use
of political democracy to reconcile differences. The two women also experienced a shift in their
personal relationship. There were many reasons why they grew apart. Probably the most
important was the friendship that emerged between MARY ROZET SMITH and Addams.
Smith's involvement with Hull-House from the 1890s was an immediate and significant
competition to Starr's closeness with Addams. Smith soon came to be Addams's most important
personal confidant and friend. Addams and Starr also diverged as "living among the poor caused
Starr to become more militant in her thoughts and actions and launched her into labor activities
and into the Socialist Party in the following decades. Yet, the one change that neither of the two
women had expected was the shift in their own relationship. The love and admiration that they
shared for each other on the eve of the opening of Hull House [sic] vanished by 1900" (Bosch,
"The [end page 840] Life of Ellen Gates Starr," 38). In 1904 Starr helped establish Chicago's
branch of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL). She worked with close associates such as
Mary Kenney (see MARY KENNEY O'SULLIVAN). While Starr joined women strikers, Jane
Addams often recoiled from personal involvement in strikes. Starr accused Addams of
"retreating to her study to write whenever a crisis occurred" (Davis, Spearheads, 106). ALICE
HAMILTON, physician and longtime Hull-House resident, admitted that she would "picket only
in the evening, when she was least likely to be arrested" (Davis, American Heroine, 111). Starr's
aggressive actions aided the cause of the workers in several strikes between 1910 and 1917. The
first was the garment workers' strike of 1910, "when Annie Shapiro, the daughter of a Russian
immigrant, and sixteen other women walked out on their jobs at Hart, Schaffner and Marx,
Chicago's largest manufacturer of men's clothing" (Bosch, "The Life of Ellen Gates Starr," 93).
"Within weeks 10 percent of Chicago's working population had gone on strike in support of the
striking women" (p. 94) and the WTUL "was quick to offer support and setup strike committees,
which Starr joined" (p. 94). Starr's reports to the strike committee and their publication in local
newspapers helped gain public support among the middle classes.
In 1914, risking negative public opinion directed toward Hull-House, Starr supported the
striking Henrici Restaurant waitresses, which landed her in jail with a charge of disorderly
conduct. "Starr's actions jeopardized contributions to Hull House [sic] from Chicago's upper
echelon, who feared and resented her growing militancy" (Bosch, "The Life of Ellen Gates
Starr," 97). Starr's subsequent trial served as a means by which she exposed the plight of the
workers to the public and publicized the experiences of the female strikers both on the picket
dine and in jail. AGNES NESTOR, then president of the Chicago WTUL, stated, "She is
positively fearless. Whenever the cause of justice and the right of free speech and personal
liberty is at stake, Miss Starr is always in the foreground of the battle" ("Miss Starr Free," Starr
Papers). Starr was acquitted and it was "a hilarious moment in the court-room when the officer
who had arrested her declared that 'she had attacked him with violence' and had 'tried to frighten
him from the discharge of his duty'" (quoted in Bosch, "The Life of Ellen Gates Starr," 100).
Starr became an honorary member of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America
after supporting their 1915 strike for improved wages. In conferring this honor on Starr in a
private letter, Sidney Hillman, the Amalgamated president, described her as "one of the best little
soldiers in the fight" (Hillman to Starr, December 22, 1915, Starr Papers). Starr campaigned
against low wages, long hours, and unsafe working conditions, especially for women. Defending
the actions of strikers, she declared in her New Republic article, "'Cheap Clothes and Nasty, '"
that "if one must starve, there are compensations in starving in a fight for freedom that are not to
be found in starving for an employer" (pp. 218-19). This was for Starr a difficult strike in which
to engage, since the Hillman union had seceded from the American Federation of Labor (AFL)affiliated United Garment Workers in 1914. The Amalgamated, under the leadership of Hillman
and BESSIE ABRAMOWITZ HILLMAN, was more radical and confrontational; neither the
WTUL nor the AFL supported the 1915 strike. Starr stood her ground, but as with other direct
actions in which she engaged, she disagreed with many of the Hull-House residents.
Starr's labor activities led to her participation in Chicago's Socialist Party from 1911 to
1928. Explaining why she joined the Socialist Party, Starr wrote in 1916 that "Socialism only, so
far as I could find out, offered any effectual method to put down the mighty from their seats and
to exalt the humble and meek" ("Why I Became a Socialist," 1916, Starr Papers). In 1916 she
ran on the Socialist ticket for alderman of the 19th Ward. Realizing that as a woman and as a
Socialist she had little chance of winning, Starr used the opportunity to raise public awareness of
society's ills. She explained that she was a Socialist because she was a Christian.
Starr condemned society for its lack of Christian values, believing that it was impossible
to carry out the teachings of Christ under the existing capitalist system. She believed that the
Christian religion taught that all men were brothers and that none should profit at the expense of
others. Starr lost the aldermanic campaign, but did not give up her fight. She began to present
lectures to religious groups throughout the Chicago area, emphasizing the need to reform
American society and to return to a Christian way of life. Speaking to the Bible Study
Department of the Hinsdale Woman's Club, in Hinsdale, Illinois, Starr argued that people had to
apply the laws of Christ to the conditions of the times, and "if we cannot, as Christians we must
admit that there is something wrong with our age and its conditions, not with His laws; and we
must try to find out what, and how to remedy it" ("The Teachings of Christ on Industrial Order,
Work, Wages, Hours and the Common Welfare," Starr Papers).
While fighting against the injustices of urban society, Starr simultaneously searched for a
religion that would satisfy her intellectually, spiritually, and aesthetically. Starr came from a
Unitarian background, but her aunt Eliza Starr, a Catholic convert herself, served as a role
model. Starr was exposed to the aesthetic and spiritual appeal of Catholicism from her aunt's art,
writings, and speeches on conversion. When Starr first began her religious quest to satisfy her
spiritual craving she turned to Jane Addams for advice. Addams, though, was of little comfort,
telling Starr that they should no longer discuss religion since they did not hold the same beliefs.
Their divergent religious views created a rift in their friendship that would later be compounded
by disagreements over the running of Hull-House and Starr's labor activism.
Filling the void left by Addams was Oberlin College mathematics professor Charles
Wager, Starr's confidant of forty years. Wager supported Starr's every endeavor, including her
religious seeking. In her quest, Starr drifted from Unitarianism to Episcopalianism, bonding with
others in religious uncertainty, including Vida Scudder and FRANCES LILLIE. Starr joined the
Episcopalian woman's lay order, the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross (SCHC);
Scudder was an influential member of the society. Under the guidance of Father James O.
Huntington, Episcopal priest and founder in 1882 of the Order of the Holy Cross, a brotherhood
devoted to an incarnational theology and a social gospel practice, Starr sought to reconcile her
need for certainty in personal belief and her desire to work for social justice in the world.
Huntington, who was also close to Scudder and the SCHC, remained in the Episcopal Church.
Starr was [end page 841] drawn to Scudder, Huntington, and other Episcopalians who embraced
a social gospel message and called for a reordering of society. What continued to depress Ellen
Starr was the failure of the social gospel message to ignite a radical transformation inside the
church. When Starr returned from the SCHC summer conference in 1909, she felt the gap
between the words that were spoken at the highest levels of ecclesiastical institutions and the
conditions of the poor. Attending services with other Episcopalians became increasingly
difficult as she felt surrounded by privilege and pretension. She had written earlier, "The
Ancient Egyptian priests had one religion for themselves and another for the people, and how
like them we often are" ("Chicago's Hull-House," Report on the Address by Ellen Starr, 1895).
Starr began to attend Catholic parish churches in the Hull-House neighborhood as her
identification with the poor intensified. Now she decided to look closely at what Roman
Catholicism might offer her. Even though the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church did not
always advocate social reforms that Starr had accepted and supported, she believed that
Catholicism with its rituals and masses would provide her with the structure and aestheticism her
soul was seeking. Ultimately Starr concluded that she had been a "Catholic at heart" (Starr to
Wager, March 3, 1920, Starr Papers) for quite a time. While her conversion aroused mixed
reactions from friends, family, and coworkers, Starr had finally attained inner peace and
harmony about her faith.
Starr's later years were ones of decreasing public involvement and increasing physical
infirmities. In 1929, she was operated on for a spinal abscess. The operation left her paralyzed.
With Hull-House residents unable to care for her, Starr moved into the Convent of the Holy
Child in Suffern, New York. Here she spent her final years browsing through old letters,
reading, painting, and corresponding with friends and family. She was able to rethink her
relationship with Jane Addams before Addams's death; Addams, too, had begun the process of
repairing the damage to their friendship. Ellen Starr died at age eighty.
Ellen Gates Starr contributed her talent and vision to the experiment of Hull-House. She
translated her ideals of social justice and the importance of aesthetics in the lives of the lowly as
well as the privileged into the programs and organizations of Chicago's Arts and Crafts and labor
movements. Her commitment to take direct action against social injustice came out of her
acceptance of the truth of Christianity's gospel message. "Though her outward appearance was
one of assurance and confidence, her inward being was filled with religious turmoil. These two
sides of Starr played against each other, culminating in her extreme drive to cure social ills while
simultaneously fulfilling her Christian ideals" (Bosch, "The Life of Ellen Gates Starr," 4).
Sources. Ellen Gates Starr Papers are in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College,
Northampton, Massachusetts, and include extensive notes by her niece Josephine Starr.
Additional information regarding Starr can be found in the Jane Addams Papers, Swarthmore
College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, and the Charles Henry Adams Wager Papers,
Spec. Coll., Oberlin College Library, Oberlin, Ohio, as well as in the American Federation of
Labor Records: The Samuel Gompers Era, the Anita McCormick Blaine Papers, and the Henry
Demarest Lloyd Papers, all of which are at the State Hist. Sec. of Wisconsin, Madison. See
"Chicago's Hull-House," Report on the Address by Ellen Starr, 1895, Hull-House Scrapbook, 3,
Jane Addams Memorial Collection, UIC Spec. Coll. The Crane-Lillie Family Papers, CHS,
contain correspondence between Lillie and Ellen Starr on topics of religion, conversion to
Catholicism, Socialism, and labor in Chicago. The most noteworthy articles written by Starr
include "Hull House Bookbindery," Commons, June 1900; "The Renaissance of Handicraft,"
International Socialist Review, February 1902; "Efforts to Standardize Chicago Restaurants –
The Henrici Strike," Survey, May 1914; "'Cheap Clothes and Nasty,'" New Republic, January
1916; "The Chicago Clothing Strike," New Review, March 1916; "A Bypath into the Great
Roadway," Catholic World, May and June 1924; "A Few Trials of a Happy Convert," the Abbey
Chronicle, March 1929. Other pertinent sources are Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House
(1910); Addams, Forty Years at Hull-House: Being "Twenty Years at Hull-House" and "The
Second Twenty Years at Hull-House" (1935); Addams, "Art Work Done by Hull House," Forum,
July 1895; Residents of Hull-House, Hull House Maps and Papers (1895); Vida Dutton Scudder,
On Journey (1937). Notable secondary works are Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The
Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement (1967); Allen F. Davis, American Heroine:
The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (1973); and Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris,
and the Craftsman Ideal in America (1986). Studies of interest include Jennifer Lynne Bosch,
"The Life of Ellen Gates Starr, 1859-1940" (Ph.D. diss., Miami Univ. of Ohio, 1990); Elizabeth
Palmer Carrell, "Reflections in a Mirror: The Progressive Woman and the Settlement
Experience" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Texas at Austin, 1981); Polly H. Ullrich, "Women in the Arts
and Crafts Movement of Chicago: 1877-1915" (master's thesis, School of the Art Institute of
Chicago, 1994). Jennifer L. Bosch's essay, "Ellen Gates Starr," from which this profile in part is
drawn, is in American National Biography, edited by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes,
copyright 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies; reprinted by permission of
Oxford University Press, Inc. See also Jennifer L. Bosch, "Ellen Gates Starr; Hull House Labor
Activist," in Culture, Gender, Race and U.S. Labor History, ed. Ronald C. Kent (1993). A
recent book focuses on religion and the Hull-House women: Eleanor J. Stebner, The Women of
Hull House: A Study of Spirituality, Vocation, and Friendship (1997). Obituaries appear in NYT
[New York Times] and CT [Chicago Tribune], February 11, 1940. [ends on page 842]
Link to website: IUPRESS.INDIANA.EDU
Credit: Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary, by Rima Lunin
Schultz and Adele Hast, (Indiana University Press, 2001). Reprinted with permission from the
Chicago Area Women’s History Council.