The Early Years at Hull House

I. Making Partners

A. Ellen Gates Starr--joined Jane Adams in this venture without ever having visited Toynbee Hall--the only settlement house model in existence.

1. Working-class background--Starr came from a working-class family, and her father's anti-capitalist beliefs  undoubtedly influence her own thinking on this matter. Her lack of deference toward the "well-born" was one of the things that attracted Addams to her--but this  also limited Starr's helpfulness in recruiting benefactors for the Hull House programs, and eventually this became one of the factors in severing their intimate personal relationship.

2. Starr's role--She provided the emotional support that Addams needed to break the family bond that had held her in Cedarville and as her stepmother's companion.

a. Lesbians?--Depends upon how that word is defined. If we use it to refer to women who sought the company of other women over the company of men, and developed deep romantic attachments with other women,  then yes Addams and Starr were lesbians. If we define the word as referring only to women who sought genital contact with other women--that  we really have no evidence of this between Addams and Starr, so we can draw no conclusions.  What we do no is that none of the people they came into contact with--including other residents of Hull House--saw nothing out of the ordinary in the relationship between the two women.

3. Starr's Financial Position--Starr did not have the money that Addams did; in fact, Starr gave up her livelihood, teaching, in order to co-found Hull House with Addams, and then had to hustle jobs to make ends meet,  since neither woman drew a salary.

4. Pleasing Addams--While Starr made many important contributions to the early success of Hull House, her anxiety over pleasing Addams on a personal level, and the personal drama led to a cooling of the personal relationship.

B. Helen Culver--inherited her uncle Charles Hull's home on  South Halstead, along with most of the property in the block the house occupied--as well as more than 220 other lots in the city.

1. Business woman--while Culver inherited a great deal of wealth from her uncle, but her management of that wealth increased it.

2. Less-than-willing philanthropist--Addams and Starr persuaded Culver to rent half of the house to them; within four years the settlement had expanded to the rest of the house and much of the block that surrounded  it--rent free.

C. Creating Female Space--Hull House was not exclusively female space, but the space created had a definite feminine touch. Much of the early attention garnered in the early was for the "feminine touches" around the house--the furnishings, the art work, etc.

II. Leading--and Learning

A. Initial Purpose--Addams and Starr both initially visualized the settlement house mainly benefiting the residents of the house, who would find uses for their lives.

B. Neighborhood--the 19th Ward was an idyllic suburb when Charles Hull  built his home, but by the late 1880s it was an extremely impoverished neighborhood. It was home to a large population of recent Italian immigrants, with a smattering of other immigrants, as well.

1. "Dirty Dagoes"--these immigrants had a reputation in Chicago for being unsanitary--unwashed, smelling bad, lazy, etc. What was overlooked was the fact that most of the homes these people lived in lacked running water, so there was no place to bath or to wash.

2. "Introducing hygiene"--one of the first things that Addams and Starr did was to open their bathrooms to their neighbors for their use, and to provide the women of the neighborhood with facilities to wash clothes. Eventually, Addams convinced the city of Chicago to open a bathhouse in the  neighborhood.

C. Learning from their neighbors--while Addams initially thought that the poor people of the neighborhood would learn from exposure to the residents living in the settlement house. What quickly became apparent to the women, however, was that the immigrant neighbors had much knowledge of their own to impart.

1. Immigrant aspirations--Addams and Starr quickly learned that many of their immigrant neighbors arrived in the United States with skills that they were not allowed to use (many were doctors, lawyers, and other professionals),  despite popular perceptions that these people were unskilled.