This post was written by Dr. Rima Lunin Schultz in June 1997, and presented at the Episcopal Church and Archives Conference, “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Anglican Visions of Apocalypse and Hope.”
Hull-House, the social settlement Jane Addams founded with Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, has come to symbolize one of the most successful and creative responses to the problems of industrial society ever undertaken. Much of what happened there is credited to Addams’ leadership and she remains a figure of national and international importance in the fields of social reform and peace. In comparison, Ellen Gates Starr remains a supporting character whose claim to fame is that she was there at the beginning. Indeed, for Starr, the settlement was only the start of a lifelong journey to translate her radical idealism into everyday practice; it was the first of many initiatives Starr tried out in her quest to make her professed faith in Christianity a living, breathing organic part of her existence. The following is the story of the way in which Starr’s religious convictions formed her radical consciousness and emboldened her to take great risks for her ideals.
Ellen Gates Starr was born in 1859 to an abolitionist family from New England, who had settled in Illinois. As a young girl her father’s involvement with the local grange and his advocacy of a cooperative system over the vicious competition in America sensitized her to view the individual in the social context. Intellectual freedom prevailed in the household as well as strong support of women’s equality; her sister Mary became an artist, her brother William a sculptor; two cousins were art photographers and another cousin, Beatrice Starr Jenkins, became an architect in Chicago. (1)
Her father’s sister, Eliza Allen Starr, had a profound influence also. A New England Unitarian spinster who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1854 and became the leading exponent of Catholic Art and literature in the Midwest, her art studio near the Cathedral church in downtown Chicago, was one of the few places where books and reproductions of medieval and renaissance religious art were available. Eliza Starr advocated the social purpose of art in modern society fearing that the human spirit was at risk in the industrial environment. Supporting herself as a writer and lecturer on art and religion, she ran an art school. (2)
Thus Starr already had an appreciation and sympathy for catholic liturgy and art when she arrived at Rockford Seminary where she was required to attend daily chapel services and weekly prayer meetings in preparation for a traditional Protestant conversion experience. Immediately Starr knew this was not her route to religion. With family resources limited, Starr remained at Rockford for only one year, planning to reenter another college later. She began teaching school, first in a small country town near her family home and in 1879, in Chicago. The next four years were difficult ones; she grappled with her religious feelings, in 1881 attempted to prepare for the Harvard Annex (Radcliffe College), and that same summer, suffered a nervous breakdown that forced her into inactivity for several weeks. This was a period of experimentation with visits to a variety of churches, wide reading in English literature (Dickens and George Eliot), history and philosophy (Carlyle and Ruskin), and studies in Anglicanism including Maurice and Kingsley. In 1883 Starr joined the Episcopal Church with some hesitancy but profoundly desirous of getting on with her life. (3) She looked to her friend, Jane Addams, to sort out what that future might hold.
Ellen Starr had met Jane Addams the year she studied at Rockford College. The friendship continued largely through letters in which the two discussed politics, literature, religion and what was the major preoccupation of them both, the quest for useful, morally significant work. This quest for a vocation, not just employment, was fraught with a variety of concerns. Both women were in their mid-to-late twenties; they were not interested in marriage. Well-read, consumed by intellectual ideas about life rather than by experience, they formed a bond with each other in their desire to chart a new, unconventional course. (4)
In 1887 Addams invited Starr to accompany her to Europe and Ellen accepted Addams’ offer to pay her expenses. (5) An intense experience, Starr loved European art and traveled to religious shrines including Monte Cassino and Assisi. She was inspired by what she observed about the Benedictine Rule when she visited Monte Cassino. The idea of work as prayer captured her attention as dramatically as Jane Addams’ attention was captured when she visited Toynbee Hall settlement in the East London slum. After their return from Europe the two women began to plan a similar venture in Chicago. The two saw Toynbee as the answer to both personal and reform goals: they could create a “home” for themselves and also do meaningful work. “Jane’s idea which she puts very much to the front and on no account will give up,” Starr wrote, “is that it is more for the benefit of the people who do it [settlement work] than for the other class [the poor in the slums]. She has worked that out of her own experience and ill health.” (6)
While Starr and Addams agreed that they both “needed” the settlement as much or more than the people in the neighborhood “needed” such a place, it is not clear whether or not they held the same vision about what the settlement would actually do. Or, perhaps at this early stage neither one had a clear sense. At age thirty-one Starr was already more preoccupied with working out the message of the social gospel she embraced in her desire to be a good Christian. In her mind the settlement would be a place where a religiously grounded fellowship addressed her concern for social as well as personal holiness. This difference in motivation was significant and within three years it was clear to both women that they had different goals for the settlement and themselves. As a practical matter, the two divided up the work of the settlement with Starr devoting herself to art, literature, and crafts, a result of her interest in Ruskin and Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement and Addams became the public spokesperson for the idea of the settlement as well as its fund-raiser.
On the personal level Starr and Addams distanced themselves from the emotional bond they had initially forged. How much their clash over Starr’s emphasis on the religious aspects of the settlement idea brought about this wedge is difficult to measure. Addams’ friendship with Mary Rozet Smith, who assumed the role of Jane’s closest and most intimate friend signaled the change that had taken place on the personal level. (7)
With the arrival of Julia Lathrop in 1890 and Florence Kelley in December 1891, Hull-House embarked on the road of social science. (8) Jane Addams and Julia Lathrop were already exploring this direction and Kelley’s knowledge of European Marxism and her university training in economics fostered a turn away from the Christian socialism expressed in Starr’s approach. Kelley and trade union leader Alzina Parsons Stevens began to collect statistics for the Illinois Bureau of Labor on the sweatshops that proliferated in the Hull-House neighborhood. (9) The factory inspection act passed in 1893 gave credibility to the investigative approach, although in the long run it would take decades before the courts outlawed sweatshops.
Lathrop and Kelley constructed moral arguments on behalf of less privileged social groups, immigrants, workers exposed to industrial hazards, women and men working more than ten hours a day, poor families generally, and child laborers, and they appealed to the State to become more activist in the protection of these groups. (10) Hull-House Maps and Papers, published in 1895 exemplified the way in which the new science of human relations was used by Hull-House women reformers with articles reporting research results on sweatshop labor, child labor, and labor organizations for working women.
Starr’s contribution, “Art and Labor” was a contrast: anti-capitalist and anti-modernist, Starr warned that it was not enough to fight for wages, you had also to fight for the soul of man against the commercial and industrial world that was crushing him. Her writing is starkly different than what develops as a maternalist-social science argument for the State assuming the protection of those who are weak. Starr, unlike the majority of women progressive reformers, did not base her social justice arguments on maternalist reasoning. She neither singled women out for special protection nor did she believe that women’s differences came out of essential nurturing qualities that, when expanded to societal problems, enhanced their capacity to bring about social transformation. (11)
In contrast to the others, she was searching for something close to a sacramental community that men and women settlement workers and poor people would share together, but both the church and the settlement were neglecting the religious function in modern society: the settlement in its increasing secularism; and the church in its neglect of “social holiness” in favor of “personal holiness.” (12)
Remaining a resident at Hull-House, Starr carved out her own space and developed a support system in Chicago and elsewhere to sustain her sense of a community of social holiness. (13) Even her room at Hull-House was more like a monastic cell than a bedroom in a Victorian home. She rose early every morning and either attended religious services at a neighborhood Catholic church or had private prayer and meditation. (14) Jane Addams, Starr reported, had accused her of “running after strange doctrines.”(15) She had her local chapter of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, (SCHC) a lay order of Episcopal women dedicated to social justice. It provided a corporate intellectual and spiritual life, a sisterhood, that included her friend Vida Scudder and others. Starr missed this at Hull House where, by the 1890s, the earlier custom of group prayer inaugurated by Starr had been replaced by a women’s political culture that had little place for corporate forms of worship and barely tolerated Starr’s religious activities.
Starr was drawn to Vida Scudder and her writings on St. Francis. Starr and Scudder became leading exponents of a self-consciously and openly religious approach to reform. They saw the settlement as a model for an alternative value system which spurned the material rewards of American society for a new ‘Franciscanism.’ Starr, Scudder, Social Gospel theologian George Herron, Episcopalian priests W. D. P. Bliss, R. Heber Newton, and James O. S. Huntington believed that a reordering of society had to take place and those who controlled wealth and property had to recognize their sins of greed and selfishness. They had to see that their luxury depended on the misery and privation of oppressed workers. (16)
By the 1890s Starr had found solace and support at Denison House in Boston with Scudder and Helen Dudley and spent time in Boston away from Hull-House affairs. The Denison group was influenced by Huntington, whose spiritual counsel could be seen in the development of the Companions and in the maturation of Starr’s religious ideas. (17) Huntington was a frequent guest at Hull-House prior to 1892 when the direction of the settlement was still malleable, although Starr’s request for his appearances met resistance from the more secular residents. What was missing, obviously, was the cross-class alliance: a community of believers that was not class segregated. (18)
Reality and the opportunity to create this community of believers entered Hull-House with the arrival of neighborhood garment workers who were encouraged by the settlement residents to use the meeting rooms for union meetings. Trade unionist Mary Kenney became a resident. In 1896 Starr participated in her first garment workers’ strike. Immediately demonstrating her desire to identify with the strikers, Starr organized relief for the workers and with Mary Kenney rushed ahead to St. Louis, Missouri, to meet a train headed for Chicago with scabs brought in to break the strike. Starr and Kenney boarded the train in the middle of the night and at breakfast lectured the men on the conditions that led to the strike. Persuaded, the men joined the union and offered their support. The strike was lost and Starr turned her attention to relocating blacklisted strikers and exhorting tailors to keep the union intact despite their losses. (19)
This was her first real engagement with the violence of labor disputes. Frazzled and exhausted, she left for New York for a prolonged period. She had operated so differently from Jane Addams who had been approached by the Chicago Civic Federation to call for arbitration for the strike. (20) This was the beginning of a lifelong pattern for Starr: she rejected roles of arbitrator, mediator, or negotiator between the classes just as she had rejected the role of social science observer and institutional bureaucrat. Her radical idealism interpreted the social gospel message rather literally. She determined that her fate would be with the oppressed and the downtrodden. Starr had no trouble identifying which side to join and she did so with religious zeal.
These involvements, however were exhausting and somewhat artificial. Starr not only identified with the cause of the worker, she wanted to be a artisan herself. In the summer of 1898 Starr sailed to England for a fifteen-month apprenticeship with Arts and Crafts bookbinder Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson. (21) She had decided to become a worker and teacher, to identify more closely with the poor by taking up manual labor, and to teach others to find joy and dignity in the simple life of a craftsman. This way she would protest the economic arrangements of modern industrial capital. When she returned wealthy Hull-House patron Mary Wilmarth provided Starr with funds to set up a bindery. Unfortunately, only two or three students a year were able to study, the materials were costly, and Starr was forced to work on commissions for wealthy patrons. (22) It was a terrible irony not missed by Starr.
Starr turned to what appeared a more fruitful agenda: organizing women for the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL). Other non-workingclass reformers and settlement residents had searched for ways to help American workingwomen. The traditional male craft unions were reluctant to organize women, assuming that they were unreliable, transitory workers who would leave work to marry. In addition, immigrant women had filled the sweatshops and, in the eyes of the male artisans, had contributed to the deskilling of the garment industry. (23) Young women, on the other hand, found it difficult to enter the world of male trade unionism because of the masculine culture of the union hall; often meeting rooms were above saloons. Ellen Starr and other settlement reformers saw a need to come to the aid of working-class girls who they knew were exploited at work and ignored by the labor movement. The WTUL was organized in 1903 to assist in the organization of women wage workers into trade unions. With the cooperation of Samuel Gompers and the AFL, the organization was permitted and actually encouraged, membership of non-wage-earners. WTUL branch chapters agreed to affiliate with AFL central labor committees. The first slate of officers in 1903 included: Mary Morton Kehew, a socially Bostonian, president; Jane Addams, vice-president; Mary Kenney (O’Sullivan), secretary. (24) In Chicago the local chapter of the WTUL organized at Hull-House. (25) Tensions between the wealthy and middle-class allies and the trade union women existed from the beginning. The allies advocated investigation of factory conditions, legislative lobbying, and educational classes, activities many trade union women considered derivative from a focus on direct organizing. On the national level, Gompers’ ambivalence about the role of non-workers in the union continued to plague the allies in the WTUL. (26)
Starr continued to work through the Episcopal Church for social change in these years, primarily with the Companions. Among the mainline denominations, the Episcopal Church was the most visionary in its rethinking of the conventional economic theories of laissez-faire capitalism and the application of Jesus’ social gospel to the contemporary wage labor system was a radical departure, even when conceived in the context of a non-violent system of mediation between labor and capital rather than a revolutionary end to private property. Yet the church continued to be an exclusive community of wealthy parishioners whose connections to the ruling class were undeniable. Here was a church able not only to produce James Huntington and Vida Scudder and, in its capacity to allow differences to flourish, gave these Christian Socialists the space to grow. But the church was also one of the major institutional strongholds of private property. It represented wealth and the power wealth had to shape the society.
Ellen Starr heard Charles Palmerston Anderson, bishop of Chicago during the garment workers’ strikes, tell propertied Episcopalians that when men used the might of money to stand out against organized and disorganized women and children over the principle of collective bargaining, they were taking a position not endorsed by the Christian church. “I believe in God,” he told his flock, “therefore I believe in the right of bargaining.” (27) The same Bishop Anderson was adept at businessmen back to Christian activism and encouraging them to join the Laymen’s Missionary Movement; at home in Chicago he set the tone for an activist, red-blooded and masculine Christianity by incorporating the leading capitalists who were members of Episcopal congregations in decision-making at the highest diocesan-wide level. Anderson, like social gospelers Walter Rausenbusch and Washington Gladden, had not called revolution or the end to private property. They had accepted the need to include associations of workers at the table with capitalists and, along general Christian ethical principles, negotiate from within the system to benefit labor and capital alike. (28)
For Starr this was too conservative an answer. “How can we tolerate it that life should go on so–all the suffering of little children, all the waste and squalor and brutality and misery of a system which might be changed,” she wrote a friend. “Nothing is worth thinking of at all in comparison to that.” (29)
Mainline Protestants were in general agreement by 1900 that the church and religion were about “here and now.” “We are beginning to realize,” wrote an Episcopal churchman in the diocesan newspaper, “that the Church and religion are concerned chiefly with men and women in this life, with their daily duties and obligations; that if we live as God would have us live in this world we need not be anxious about the world to come.” (30)
What continued to depress Ellen Starr, however, was the failure of the social gospel message to ignite a radical transformation inside the churches and, without that, there was little hope for change in society as a whole. Most laborers worked in oppressive conditions and lived substandard housing. With seasonal layoffs and economic depressions children and women as well as men worked to survive. The churches were doing enough because their members, the wealthy and powerful, were not motivated to change the way the economy actually worked. When Starr returned from the Society for the Companions of the Holy Cross 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 social 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.” (31) It hurt her the way civil rights activists were hurt and resented the segregated churches they attended, especially when lip service was given to the movement for racial equality.
Starr began to attend Catholic parish churches in the Hull-House neighborhood because she identified with the poor. (32) Now she decided to look closely at what Roman Catholicism might offer her. In her case, this transition was not out of character; she was drawn to the ceremony, the mystery, the symbolism of Catholicism. In 1907 she collapsed from nervous exhaustion and spent a month in a sanitarium followed by weeks of recuperation. Struggling with depression, she was disappointed in her failure to expand the bindery at Hull-House into a successful employment venture. At age forty-nine having had her application rejected for residence in a communitarian experiment in Tennessee run by Huntington’s Order of the Holy Cross, she went abroad to live in relative isolation on a farm in Ireland. She came back to the States in 1909 to begin a new life. “I… went to pieces and decided I was a failure. But I did have the vitality left to ask God to give me another chance–an eleventh hour chance to serve.” (33) But she continued to wander from church group to labor union, from Socialist Party politics to private tutoring from a Roman Catholic priest who gently, persistently, patiently counseled her and deflected her abusive criticism of the Roman Catholic hierarchy until she was ready to convert. (34)
In all this, Starr continued to actively participate in the labor struggle. In 1910 when a group of courageous women walked out of their shop at Hart, Schaffner & Marx in Chicago, they ignited the spark caused the unorganized workers in Chicago’s male-dominated establishments to rise in rebellion against their employers. Starr, as a member of the WTUL picket committee, promptly joined strikers on the picket lines, patrolled the streets, and served as a witness in court for strikers arrested without due cause. (35) As the strike dragged on Starr appealed everywhere for support of the strike, including the Christian evangelical community where she successfully obtained endorsement for the strike from the Laymen’s Evangelistic Council. The Episcopal Diocese of Chicago also endorsed the strike. (36)
Shortly after the Garment Workers’ Strike Starr joined the Party, and while it was a far cry from the genteel utopian visions of William Morris or the Fabians, Ellen Starr had come a long way from the inexperienced dreamer who had begun Hull-House in 1889. Starr fit in with the Marxist, hard-line, predominantly immigrant organization and although middle-class social workers were discouraged from joining, by 1915 she was serving on the Cook County Socialist Party’s executive committee. (37) She was able to do this even while deepening her commitment to Christianity. For Starr, her labor union radicalism seemed to draw her more deeply into her faith, or perhaps, the arduous task of standing up for the workers, against the wealthy and powerful, could only be endured by her through the strength of her religious convictions. It was her vision of the implementation of the social gospel here on earth that continued to inspire and sustain her as much as the realities of oppressive conditions stirred her rebellion. When she ran for alderman of the Nineteenth Ward as a socialist she explained her credo: “I became a Socialist because I was a Christian. The Christian religion teaches that all men are to be regarded as brothers, that no one should wish to profit by the loss or disadvantages of others…that none should enjoy ‘two coats’ while others are coatless. Civilized life is in grotesque contrast to all this. Only socialism promised to put down the mighty from their seats and to exalt the humble and meek; to fill the hungry with good things and to send the rich, if not quite ’empty away,’ at least relieved of some of their unnecessary and arrogant fulness [sic].” (38)
In the textile strike of 1913, Starr battled the manufacturers to help the workers secure sixty percent of their demands. It was her first successful strike and buoyed her for her next foray into the eye of the storm. On March 6, 1914, at age fifty-five, Starr was brought to trial on a charge of disorderly conduct stemming from her behavior on the picket line at a waitresses’ strike in Chicago. She had shouted at the police, who had unjustly arrested three waitresses on picket duty, “I am a citizen and as such protest this arrest.” The crowd became excited and it was reported that they shouted “Kill the police.” Bail was provided by Mary Wilmarth longtime friend and patron of Starr and Hull-House; her son-in-law, Harold Ickes, served as Starr’s trial attorney and, after eight hours deliberation at its conclusion, a jury found her innocent. (39) Within a few months of her trial she sailed to Europe to make another tour of the medieval shrines, revisiting Assisi and the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino.
The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) strike of 1915 was a different experience, and placed Ellen Starr in the difficult position of disagreeing with almost everyone but the strikers themselves and a few radical friends. This strike, unlike earlier ones, did not receive the support of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) or the American Federation of Labor (AFL), two of the strongest labor organizations in the nation and, in times past, allies with Starr. AFL president Samuel Gompers urged his followers not to support the garment strikers led by Sidney Hillman’s ACWA because it had seceded from the AFL-affiliated United Garment Workers 1914. Gompers argued that Hillman’s defection threatened union unity. During the course of the strike, from October to December, over 1,700 strikers were arrested and two were killed. Starr herself was arrested several times for “inciting a riot” and insisted on a jury trial to bring the facts to the public. (40)
In the end neither side won a decisive victory. The manufacturers’ association created to oppose the ACWA signed no agreements and refused to submit its differences with the strikers to arbitration. The centrist head of the American Federation of Labor and one of, if not the most powerful, labor leaders in the United States, Samuel Gompers, debated Ellen Starr in the pages of the New Republic. Distrustful of middle-class allies whose interests could never be the same as the working class, and increasingly hostile to socialists, he told Starr to stay out of labor’s business. Starr blamed the loss on the “heavy hand of Mr. Gompers.” Without AFL support the strikers had to depend upon middle-class allies. (41)
The strike had been a failure but out of it, radical union leaders of the two leading garment unions, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America had won control from conservative union officials. The new union leaders, as well as the rank and file, demanded that their union reflect their own special vision of society, a cooperative commonwealth in which justice and equal opportunity provided the guiding principles. Women union leaders especially called for programs to expand the cultural, intellectual, and social horizons of their members. Starr, praised by its president, Sidney Hillman, was made an honorary member of the ACWA for her role in the union’s success. (42)
Ellen Starr’s battle with the Episcopal Church most likely was more difficult that going against Samuel Gompers. In some ways Gompers, who did well with the conservative social gospel churchmen, (43) was more like the propertied leadership than the rank and file strikers she had met on the picket lines. At any rate, tired and reluctant to attend General Convention in 1919, she had been persuaded by her longtime friend Vida Scudder to attend. Nineteen-nineteen was the year the church launched its nation-wide campaign as part of its organizational restructuring. In the 1880s Christians hoped to apply the Golden Rule to the social problems of industrial America to save society. In the 1920s, business methods were brought to the church to save Christianity. Like other corporations, the church had become nationalized; social gospel work was now coordinated in a department of social service. A fund was created to operate the new bureaucracy. (44)
Starr was sixty-one at the time of her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Becoming part of a Catholic intellectual community in Chicago, she joined a circle of educated Catholics who shared her interest including Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, both in residence at the University of Chicago, hardly the common folk in the parish churches, but in many ways the closest intellectual relatives to the Anglo-Catholics of her youth. Always the maverick, she defended Lenin and the Russian Revolution, read Gerard Manley Hopkins, and made appeals for Sacco and Vanzetti’s commutation from their death sentences. Increasingly, ill health and simple old age kept Ellen Starr from more activist involvements
She affiliated herself, finally, with a Benedictine monastery and became an oblate in the third order of St. Benedict. (45) She died in Suffern, New York in 1940.
By 1920, a conservative, non-socialist “social gospel” had been incorporated into mainstream Protestantism as the institutions of Christianity began to take on the organizational structure of the business corporation itself. The “social gospel” of the twentieth-century church recognized religion’s social service responsibility to a broad public but no longer pitted itself against the social injustices of industrialism. In essence, the social gospel had become a generalized acceptance of institutional religion’s connection with the social life of the nation. By 1920 Ellen Starr saw little hope in organized religion’s revolutionary potential.
Starr was uncompromising, self-critical, and ultimately, a minority voice who saw in the successes of progressive social reform the death of the revolutionary gospel spirit that had awakened her conscience and whole generation of idealists in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1892, only three years after its opening, Starr accused Hull-House of being merely “an excuse for the things we ought to do and be and don’t and aren’t.” (46)
“We” was not a figure of speech; Starr was self-critical and uncompromising in the demands she made of herself. She was also prophetic. Few of her generation remained true to the radical idealism inherent in the social gospel message; the majority became convinced that social legislation, collective bargaining and the expansion of political rights could make the economic system more democratic and alleviate the worst abuses of industrial capitalism. Theirs was a quest for a social ethic that would mediate between the classes, not end the class structure; would negotiate among the competitive elements in society, not end competition; and would apply a secularized social gospel message as a civic platform.
Starr held fast to the conviction that a fundamental reordering society must take place. This reordering could not come without a spiritual renewal of the individual leading to the restructuring of society to a collectivist and religious social ethic. Starr found all the institutional structures to which she gave her devotion and commitment ultimately incapable of bringing about this reordering–neither the settlement house, the Socialist Party, the labor movement, or the Episcopal Church were able to give the kind of leadership and support Starr had hoped to find.
Endnotes:
(1) Polly H. Ullrich, “Women in the Arts and Crafts Movement of Chicago: 1877-1915,” M.A. Thesis, Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1994.
(2) Archibald J. Byrne, “Eliza Allen Starr,” Notable American Women 1607-1950. A Biographical Dictionary. Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, editors. Harvard University Press, 1971, vol. III, 350-351; the Rev. James McGovern, The Life and Letters of Eliza Allen Starr. 1904.
(3) Elizabeth Palmer Carrell, “Reflections in a Mirror: The Progressive Woman and the Settlement Experience,” Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 1981, 92, 100-101.
(4) Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York: Macmillan, 1910. See Starr-Addams Correspondence in Ellen Gates Starr Papers, Sophia Smith Collection (EGS/SSC), Smith College. See: Jennifer Lynne Bosch, “The Life of Ellen Gates Starr, 1859-1940,” Ph.D. dissertation, Miami University of Ohio, 1990.
(5) Carrell, 109.
(6) Ellen Starr to Mary Blaisdell, Feb. 23, 1889, EGS/SSC.
(7) Jennifer Bosch, “The Life of Ellen Gates Starr,” 76; Carrell, diss., 177-178.
(8) Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull-House Maps and Papers: Social Science as Women’s Work in the 1890s” in Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., The Social Survey in Historical Perspective 1880-1940. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
(9) Carolyn Daniel McCreesh, Women in the Campaign to Organize Garment Workers, 1880-1917. Garland Publishing, 1985, 65; Residents of Hull-House, Hull-House Maps and Papers. Arno Press & The New York Times, 1970 reprint.
(10) Sklar, 117-118.
(11) I come to this conclusion because the absence of writings or activities between 1880 and 1920 on the part of Starr in relation to women’s organizations or the suffrage question. Addams takes on major leadership roles in the suffrage battle after 1900 and writes important popular arguments in the maternalist vein in favor of women voting. Starr appears not to have been involved. Female social gospelers such as Frances E. Willard, a Christian Socialist and the president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, linked their arguments for the coming kingdom on earth with a special role for morally superior women. Starr makes no arguments of this nature.
(12) Ellen Starr, “Settlement Life,” 1896, Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross. She describes an almost mystical relationship in which settlement workers enter into the life of the community.
(13) Looking at “List of Members,” S.C.H.C., in 1884, 1887, 1888, 1890, 1892, 1894, Ellen Gates Starr is listed for the first time in 1894.
(14) Carrell, 134-135; Mary Prentice Lillie Barrows, “God and My Mother,” mss., 312, Box 3, Frances Crane Lillie Papers, Chicago Historical Society.
(15) Ellen Starr to Mary Allen, c. 1894/95, EGS/SSC, Box VII.
(16) Vida Scudder, On Journey. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1937, 240-241; Carrell, 3; Ellen Starr, “A Bypath into the Great Roadway,” Catholic World vol. 119, May 1924, 179.
(17) Ellen Starr, “A Bypath into the Great Roadway,” 179.
(18) Huntington had great difficulty balancing the demands of his contemplative life with settlement work. In 1892 the Order of the Holy Cross left the East Side of New York and settled in rural Maryland. D.G. Paz, “Monasticism and Social Reform,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, vol. XLVIII, #1, March 1979, pp. 56-57.
(19) Carrell, 233-234.
(20) Ibid.
(21) See Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.
(22) Carrell, 301-305.
(23) Elizabeth Payne, Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women’s Trade Union League, University of Illinois, 1988. This book discusses the Chicago league and its relationship to Hull-House residents.
(24) McCreesh, Women in the Campaign to Organize Garment Workers, 86-88.
(25) Payne.
(26) McCreesh, 66-67; 125-127.
(27) Charles L. Street quoting Bishop Charles P. Anderson, Memorial Sermon, The Diocese of Chicago, 1936.
(28) Rima Lunin Schultz, “The Making of An American Church: Cathedral Ideal and Parish Realities. The Episcopal Church in Illinois, 1834-1946,” unpublished mss., 1986. Archives, Episcopal Diocese of Chicago. See especially chapters eight and nine.
(29) Carrell, 343.
(30) The Diocese of Chicago, April 1910, 10.
(31) “Chicago’s Hull-House,” Report on the Address by Ellen Starr, 1895, Hull-House Scrapbook, III, JAMC.
(32) Carrell, 344.
(33) Starr to Wager, Hull-House, February 12, 1917, EGS/SSC, Box VIII.
(34) Carrell, 398-400.
(35) Women’s Trade Union League of Chicago, Official Report of the Strike Committee, 10.
(36) Official Report of the Strike Committee, Garment Workers’ Strike, Oct. 29, 1910-February 1911, Women’s Trade Union League, Microfilm, Chicago Historical Society. Thekla Ellen Caldwell, “Women, Men, and Revival: The Third Awakening in Chicago,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1991.
(37) Carrell, 357.
(38) Clipping, “Why I am A Socialist: Miss Starr to Stick in Race,” February 10, 1916, Ellen Gates Starr Biographical File, Chicago History Museum.
(39) Carrell, 357-358.
(40) McCreesh, 218-220. The exchange of letters between Gompers and Starr were published in the New Republic January 1916- March 1916.
(41) Ibid.
(42) Carrell, 364.
(43) Elizabeth and Kenneth Fones-Wolf, “Trade-Union Evangelism: Religion and the AFL in the Labor Forward Movement, 1912-1916” in Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society. Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds., University of Illinois Press, 1983.
(44) Schultz, “Making of An American Church,” 561-562.
(45) Carrell, 412-413.
(46) Carrell, 30.