7

Social Housekeeping: The Inspiration of Jane Addams

My Ever Dear. . . . When you get back we will talk over a plan that is in my mind. I didn’t say what I wanted to in the confessional the other night because I didn’t feel sure enough of myself—but if you ever doubt my desire to be with you—I wish you could be at the bottom of my mind.

—Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, February 21, 1897

 

IN HER ACCOUNT of how she founded one of the first settlement houses in the United States, Jane Addams described her terrible depression after she received her degree from Rockford College in 1882, when she had no idea what to do with the rest of her life. The depression was exacerbated the following year when she went to Europe for “finishing,” as young women of her social class often did. There, in places such as East London, she saw up close the wretched poverty and misery in which much of humanity lived and from which she had always been sheltered in her upper-middle-class world. Addams claimed that her European experience made her understand that her modern education, which stuffed a young woman with culture and nothing more, was useless. It cloyed with its self-absorption, its insulation from the problems of the world. As she wrote in her essay “Filial Relations,” what a college woman needed after graduation was not “finishing” or a return to the bosom of her family until she married but some activity that, “involving the use of all her faculties, shall be a response to all the claims which she so keenly feels”—the claims to contribute more largely to the betterment of her society.

 

Jane Addams as a Radical

The historian Jill Conway has suggested that reformers such as Jane Addams and Lillian Wald (the founder of the second most famous settlement house in America, Henry Street) did little to change the weak position of women in their day. They never publicly challenged the conventional view of femininity (that is, the mother-heart cliché) or demanded nontraditional roles for women. Thus, Conway complains, the impact of their usefulness for females in the twentieth century was short-lived.

Indeed, it is true that in her public statements, Jane Addams seldom seemed to question gender stereotypes. For instance, as vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association under Anna Shaw, she argued that suffrage was not an “educated woman’s issue.” All women needed the vote for the sake of their families and neighborhoods, she said, in order to influence legislation regarding pure food, schools, rent control, and fire protection in tenements. In establishing Hull House, Addams claimed to be looking backward to the “less selfish time” of her great-grandmother’s day, when women reacted to others’ suffering or helplessness through works of charity and betterment.

However, Addams had conceived a brilliantly creative antidote to the pressures that called a young woman home to a passive life after college. By founding a settlement house, where educated women could operate independently of their families and where they could help people in need, she was actually looking forward. She was establishing one of the few professions that has been consistently dominated by women—even in the terrible mid-twentieth century, when women were being excluded once again from all the other professions that they had entered after the great struggles of the previous century. As the virtual mother of social work and related occupations, Addams had a tremendous impact on the lives of generations of educated women who attained professional status thanks to her. She must be credited, much more than Conway and others have been willing to do, for understanding what was necessary in her own day to effect the ends she believed to be important. While seeming to reify the category “woman” by expanding it to a larger scale, she actually found a way to help great numbers of women leave the prison of the domestic sphere and enter the public sphere.

Indeed, what a later era considered excessively cautious behavior, as Conway characterizes Jane Addams’s public stance, was in Addams’s day still considered by some as a wildly radical threat to the status quo. Though Addams obfuscated the revolutionary meaning of her work, she was viciously attacked, as her hate mail shows, simply because she suggested that women should have a role outside the home and a public voice. One anonymous letter she received, written in response to her campaign against government corruption, asserted that

 

I love your sex . . . but no man can love a woman who takes her place among men as you do. . . . Of course I can speak very plain to you, as your highest ambition is to be recognized as capable of doing a man’s work. When your maker created you, it was evidently a rush job as the most important part of the work was overlooked. Here then is your only resource. Did it ever occur to you that while on a tour of inspection, through alleyways, old barns and such places where low depraved men with criminal records may be found (such a place a virtuous woman would be afraid to go) you might for a small sum induce one of such men to sell you his pecker and balls? It would not be much loss to him and will be your only chance to prove yourself a man.

 

If merely leading a social housekeeping campaign elicited such violent personal attacks on a woman’s gender, it is hard to imagine that a more obviously rebellious persona, of the kind that Addams has been criticized for avoiding, would have had any power at all to effect the changes she desired.

 

Jane Addams as a Lesbian, Part I

Addams had no interest in heterosexual marriage and spent her adult years, almost until her death, with other women, in long-term relationships that we would describe as lesbian today. In a homophobic society in which lesbianism has been considered tantamount to degeneracy and outlawry, to suggest that Jane Addams, one of the truly outstanding women in American history—the quintessential American heroine, one biographer dubbed her—was thus tainted has been wildly controversial. “No other single institution . . . did as much [as Addams’s Hull House] to counteract the dogma of individualism and restore the social principle to thought about civilization,” Charles and Mary Beard observed in their classic 1942 study of “the idea of civilization in the United States.” Addams has been credited as absolutely instrumental in ushering in a new era in secular society that encouraged people of wealth to see the poor not as ignorant hordes to be exploited but as their responsibility. Even recent biographers have shown how Addams was “a central figure” in progressivism and a vital “moving force in [America’s] transition” from the laissez-faire society of her youth to the welfare state it became in the years before her death. More than any other individual of her day, scholars have said, Addams was responsible for awakening America’s social conscience. That being so, how could she have been a lesbian?

As an examination of Jane Addams’s correspondence unarguably reveals, women were often enamored of her. Yet her numerous biographers have agreed that while she was a good friend to many, she generally kept an emotional distance. That assessment is largely true, except with regard to two women who were Jane Addams’s domestic partners: first, Ellen Starr, the woman with whom she established Hull House, and later Mary Rozet Smith, a benefactor of Hull House with whom Addams had a relationship that became a primary one in the early 1890s and lasted until Smith’s death, in 1934.

Jane Addams’s relationship with Ellen Starr began in 1877, when they were both students in Illinois at Rockford Female Seminary (which became Rockford Female College before Addams graduated). Though Ellen left Rockford at the end of that year in order to support herself as a teacher, she and Jane continued to correspond. Their letters reveal in compelling detail the slow growth and increasing intensity of what they surely came to regard as a romantic friendship and then a Boston marriage.

The earliest letters are far from intense, and even portray something of the studied distance that generally characterized Jane’s personal relationships. In an 1879 letter, the nineteen-year-old Jane, with cool objectivity, wrote to Ellen that their “social intercourse is probably over for all time. It is queer though, but a fact, that I am glad when I know some people just so much and then stop . . . [because] you remember them and retain the impressions they leave, go steadily on your own way, and meet someone else, who will sort of finish out what they began.” This unemotional attitude is an ironic contrast to her later correspondence with Ellen, which mocked this notion of the interchangeability of their relationship.

Their growing closeness is first suggested by a letter from Ellen to Jane after a prolonged visit. “I suppose it is better that I can’t see you very often,” Ellen wrote. “I should get to depending on you, bodily, in a little while, and that would be quite sure to make me trouble in the end.” But, she confessed, despite her fear of bodily dependence, “I can’t help wishing that we could sometimes be in the same place long enough to do some work together. I believe we should work well.” Embarrassed by her forwardness, she hastened to add, “So much for expressing my ‘feelins.”’ The next day, however, continuing the letter, she picked up where she had left off, though now humorously placing her sentiments in the mouth of a friend who had recently met Jane: “She said today, ‘It would be so easy to love Miss Addams. I think her face is beautiful.’ She said something about the way Miss Addams talked, too, but—I will not repeat the expressions of so deluded a person. I’m afraid I didn’t do anything to scatter the delusions. I shall always like her better because she has seen you.”

The fluster in some of Ellen’s letters written during these years suggests an excitement that is generally associated with eros. “My Dear,” she addressed Jane in December 1885, “it has occurred to me that it might just be possible that you would spend a night with me if you should be going east at the right time. If you decide to go the week before Christmas—I mean—what do I mean? I think it is this. Couldn’t you decide to spend the Sunday before Christmas with me? Get here on Saturday and go on Monday? . . . Please forgive me for writing three letters in a week. It is virtuous in me to stop now.”

Jane was by temperament more reserved than the spontaneous Ellen. But as her own letters reveal, she kindled to Ellen’s spark. After becoming acquainted with a young woman who was interested in art (as Ellen was), Jane wrote in 1883, “It has set me to thinking very constantly of you. Not that I need any reminder.” Over the next couple of years, Jane was confused by her feelings, as she wrote to Ellen in 1885: “I am very impatient to see you, and am haunted by a fear that I do not know you.” A closer acquaintance must have proved happy. In 1888, Jane and Ellen traveled to Europe together, and in London they visited Toynbee Hall, a settlement house that brought (male) Oxford students to live and work among the poor. From that visit the idea of Hull House was born.

By 1889, with their settlement house project under way, they were both ecstatic that they were making reality out of Ellen’s dream that they might someday join their energies. “Let’s love each other through thick and thin and work out a salvation,” Jane implored Ellen in January. Their salvation was to be their love for each other as well as their love of good works. During their brief separations at this time, Jane wrote often to Ellen and awaited her answering letters impatiently. “I need you, dear one, more than you can realize,” Jane confessed, and (somewhat peremptorily), “My Dear One—a day without a letter is blanc as the French say of sleepless nights. I don’t like such a day at all—and I have just had one.”

 

The Significance of Hull House

In February 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Starr decided to get a large, comfortable house in a Chicago neighborhood that was inhabited mostly by immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. They would invite other college-educated young women to join them there, and they would all exchange visits with their neighbors and be useful in whatever way they could. They would be different from the Lady Bountiful types of other eras, who had established orphan asylums or paid charity visits and then returned to the comforts of affluent homes. Addams and Starr and the young women who chose to work with them would become personally involved in the lives of the people they hoped to help. They would learn from the poor at least as much as the poor would learn from them.

Hull House, as they called the settlement, was to be not only a place to do good works but also a home in which Jane and Ellen were romantic partners. In the large house the two women “had our own bedroom,” as Ellen recorded, and they set up “several others with little single beds” for the residents they hoped would join them. Hull House soon became a community of women. It was revolutionary because, as the historian Kathryn Kish Sklar has noted, while it was not a religious order, it provided Jane and Ellen and myriad other women with a lifelong substitute for marriage, “supplying in a radical degree an independence from the claims of family life and inviting them to commit their energies elsewhere.”

Hull House was the beginning of one of the most effective social reform movements in America. It addressed itself eventually to correcting urban ills in all forms. Jane Addams and Ellen Starr’s settlement very quickly included a separate little house fitted up as a kitchen, where meals were prepared for the sick and immigrant women were taught about American foods. A day nursery was established for working mothers. The saloon next door was transformed into a little gymnasium. In front of the main house another little building was erected, and its first floor was given rent-free to the public library to set up a reading room; the second floor was a studio for art classes and exhibits. College extension classes were offered at Hull House by University of Chicago graduates and faculty members, and Hull House sent 90 percent of the students to Rockford College for summer school. The settlement also became a meeting place for labor groups such as garment workers, and on its premises a trade union was established. At a time when kindergartens were virtually unknown, one was established at Hull House. Vocational training classes were instituted at Hull House long before the concept spread to schools. A cooperative lodging house was established there for young working women.

Though Hull House had been conceived as a fairly modest neighborhood project, its scope grew rapidly along with the interests of its founders. Addams and Starr were soon working with groups who lived far from the Hull House neighborhood. They reached out to include people of all ethnic groups and races in the battle for social justice. For example, Addams joined forces with female African-American leaders such as Ida B. Wells in the successful campaign against a move to segregate Chicago schools. She eventually also organized research and investigation teams of female social scientists who had been trained in the graduate programs at the newly established University of Chicago. (She was probably the first to take the work of female social scientists seriously.) She used their findings in a variety of ways that bore fruit for the poor and disadvantaged. The facts and figures they produced became indispensable in helping Hull House agitate for legislative changes not only in its district but also throughout the city and the state.

For example, under Addams’s auspices, the social scientists conducted housing investigations, which provided information that enabled Hull House staff to organize a successful campaign for tenement ordinances. Addams also encouraged the social scientists to investigate sweatshops, and on the basis of their research, the Hull House staff pushed successfully for the first factory law in Illinois to address the problems of child labor and the exploitation of working women. As a result of the social scientists’ investigation of the Chicago court system, settlement staff was able to exert pressure that resulted in the establishment of the first juvenile court in the country. As a 1915 observer stated, “With the exception of religion, there was no human interest that [Hull House] failed to touch.”

But even more significant for America, Hull House was a replicable experiment. It may have been an idea whose time had come, but Addams’s charisma and quicldy growing national reputation helped to guarantee that there would be no delay. By 1900, almost one hundred settlement houses like Hull House were spread across the country, most of them founded by women. Addams’s example also inspired the transformation of various groups into organizations whose main focus became working for social betterment. In the 1890s, the ubiquitous Women’s Clubs, banded together in a General Federation of Women’s Clubs, exchanged their original goal of “intellectual uplift” for goals such as the eradication of child labor, the establishment of public libraries, tenement reform—all causes that Jane Addams had brought to widespread public attention.

 

The relationship between Ellen Starr and Jane Addams fulfilled them both on various levels for a time. Because they were enchanted with each other, they became a team, which aided the realization of their ambition to devote their lives to bettering the world. Their romance with each other and with their task occurred at a time in their lives when young women of their era were supposed to be thinking hard about marriage and scheming for its advent. But the obligations inherent in nineteenth-century heterosexual marriage would have been counterproductive to Jane and Ellen’s shared passion to do good works on a large scale. Unlike most marriages in their day, their “marriage” not only permitted their ambition, it made it possible.

In her autobiography, Jane Addams credits Ellen Starr as her partner in the establishment of Hull House. “The comfort of Miss Starr’s companionship, the vigor and enthusiasm which she brought to bear upon it, told both in the growth of the plan and upon the sense of its validity,” she wrote. At the start of their project, they seemed to shine equally, as the newspaper reporters who interviewed them proclaimed (as in the headline “College Girls Who Will Found a Colony in the Slums”). The Woman’s Journal of 1889 wrote glowingly about their partnership, in which the passionate Starr supplied the zing of vivacity that balanced the businesslike Addams’s more serious and stolid approach: “More perfect counterparts could scarcely be imagined. Miss Starr supplements Miss Addams completely.” In the early days of Hull House, Jane needed Ellen emotionally. As Allen Davis observes, “More important [than the skills she brought to the Hull House project], Ellen was completely devoted to her friend.”

Ellen Starr contributed to Hull House in concrete ways too. She opened culture to the working-class European immigrants of the neighborhood, who had before assumed that culture was only for the wealthy. She taught art history classes; she conducted literary clubs for working girls and young mothers, introducing them to Shakespeare, George Eliot, Robert Browning; she set up a program to lend reproductions of master paintings to families and schools in the neighborhood. She was also interested in the labor problems of these immigrants. When the workers who congregated at Hull House organized strikes, she not only collected money for them, she also walked the picket lines with them. She was a charter member of the Illinois branch of the Women’s Trade Union League and battled against injustices such as child labor. She was even arrested in a 1914 waitress strike when she tried to protect workers from police brutality.

 

Jane Addams as a Lesbian, Part II

Though Ellen Starr continued to live and work at Hull House until 1920, her intimate relationship with Jane Addams had long been over by then. Perhaps the end was built in from the beginning. Even as a young woman, Ellen, who had been raised as a Unitarian, was thirsty for a more intense spirituality. She had converted to high-church Episcopalianism when she was twenty-five years old. Jane, who was emotionally at loose ends during that period, envied her friend’s religious certainty and let herself be advised by Ellen in spiritual matters. The following year, with Ellen’s encouragement, Jane joined a church and had herself baptized. But the act brought her no lasting sense of fulfillment, and she felt confirmed in her suspicion that she had no capacity for doctrine or veneration.

When the press and the public tried to find a religious motive in the establishment of Hull House, Jane was disgusted, as she wrote to Ellen: “I positively feel my callers peering into my face to detect ‘spirituality.’” As her nephew James Linn later observed in his biography, “Her humanitarianism was too pervasive . . . to permit the entrance of any large interest in dogma.” She was a secular humanist par excellence. Ellen, in contrast, became increasingly absorbed by religious dogma. Her own spiritual quest was intensified when she went to London in the early 1890s and became part of an aesthetic and spiritually inclined British circle. Like other Victorian and Edwardian aesthetes—Oscar Wilde, the lesbian couple who published poetry under the name Michael Field, and Radclyffe Hall are salient examples—Ellen Starr finally converted to Catholicism, in 1920. She joined the Convent of the Holy Child in 1930. In 1935, the year Jane Addams died, she became an oblate of the Third Order of Saint Benedict.

It is impossible to know for certain whether Ellen’s recommitment to religion at the start of the 1890s was a cause or an effect of the alienation between her and Jane. But its apparent beginning coincided with the entrance into their lives of the daughter of a wealthy Chicago industrialist, Mary Rozet Smith. Linn says that Smith “drifted to the House in the course of its first year, to see whether there was anything she could do there.” During the spring of 1890, Jane’s letters to Mary invariably employed the plural pronoun; for example, “It would give us great pleasure to have you come on Monday.” But by the following winter, Jane was often exclusive and quite personal in her correspondence with Mary, which is especially remarkable in the context of her very reserved letters to almost all her other correspondents. For instance, in December 1890, when Mary was contemplating spending the rest of the winter in California because of a cough, Jane wrote to her, “I have a great fear of your being whisked off. . . . It would make a great difference to me whether you were in the city or out of it.” Mary and Jane soon began to see each other often. For a time, Ellen continued to make up their party, and some of Jane’s letters to Mary in early 1891 sent “love from Ellen.” But it was not much longer before mention of Ellen ceased.

The break between Jane and Ellen could not have been easy. They had been close for fifteen years, yet only a year after the opening of Hull House, as Allen Davis has observed, “Jane and Ellen drifted apart.” Though on the surface Ellen remained a loyal friend to Jane, the loss of intimacy was for a time traumatic to her. She attempted to deal with it at one point by going off to Europe for fifteen months. Yet she complained to Jane once there, “I feel uncommon blue and homesick tonight. . . . I suppose you are working yourself to death. I don’t get many letters.” Several of Ellen’s letters reveal her depression. In one, she began, “My dear, I’m tired. I make you that confidence.” Self-pityingly, she wrote of being in a streetcar and letting “my eyes and mind wander over the most unmitigated barrenness and hideousness extant.” Almost as if she were saying “So there!” she confessed that the crisis she was experiencing had turned her to “a fresh love of ecclesiasticism” (which she must have known by then would be annoying to Jane). “Perhaps I will get great spiritual gain out of my infirmity,” she observed, adding, “It’s good for me to go upon my knees.” She apparently realized how bathetic the letter was and concluded, “I probably shouldn’t have written.”

An 1892 letter from Jane, written in response to another doleful missive from Ellen, demonstrates both Jane’s attempt to be sympathetic and a surprising insensitivity. “My Dear One,” Jane wrote soothingly, assuring Ellen of both her affection and her belief that Ellen continued to be important to their Hull House project: “Your letter was a little homesick. Of course I miss you all the time and have never wanted you more than the last few days when everything seemed to be moving at once.” But she would not lie about Mary’s presence in her life, though she must have understood that her admissions would not be easy for Ellen to bear. “We have put a single iron bed in the blue room (it has never looked so well). Mary and I may take it together,” she wrote, and “Last night Miss Scammon was here for the night, Miss Babcock and Miss McLane, so of course Mary and I slept together.”

To the end, Ellen and Jane tried to be gracious to each other. Jane attempted to provide for Ellen financially in her old age. And Ellen, at the age of seventy-six (only months before Jane’s death, in 1935), perhaps in preparation for taking religious vows, reread their old correspondence, contemplated their young years, and wrote Jane a truly remarkable note that more than hints at her early emotional struggle over being replaced by Mary yet seems sincerely to proclaim her final placid reconciliation:

 

I can see by the way you overrate me in these letters that it was inevitable that I should disappoint you. I think that I have always, at any rate for a great many years, been thankful that Mary came to supply what you needed. At all events, I thank God that I never was envious of her in any vulgar or ignoble way. One couldn’t be of any one so noble and generous and in every way fair-minded as she.

 

Despite the termination of their intimacy not long after they founded Hull House, the relationship between Ellen and Jane had been vital to them both. Besides fulfilling their emotional needs for a time, it permitted them to begin the grand scheme of Hull House, which neither woman could have managed on her own. But Addams’s extraordinary talents, especially her writing and speaking abilities, soon drew the limelight to her alone, garnering her a national and then an international reputation. As she recognized, however, she could not have taken the first step without Ellen. Their mutual romantic devotion for about fifteen years was what made the crucial beginning possible.

 

Almost every biographer of Jane Addams has recognized the importance of her relationship with Mary Rozet Smith, yet it has been difficult for most of them to discuss it as lesbian, since, as Blanche Cook has pointed out, a “conventional lady with pearls” (as both Jane and Mary were) has generally not been thought of in terms that the twentieth century has associated with perversion. Yet a perusal of their correspondence leaves little doubt of the romance and commitment of their relationship and the fact that they considered themselves a married couple. Even biographers who do not wish to deal with Jane Addams as a lesbian are constrained to observe that while her letters to almost everyone during the 1890s and later are emotionally remote, those to Mary, which address her as “My Ever Dear,” “Darling,” and “Dearest One,” are unique in their fervor. Jane, who kept her emotions in check with regard to practically everything, could not and would not hide her feelings for Mary. By February 1893, she was even writing to her sister Alice Haldeman that Mary was “so good to me that I would find life a different thing without her.”

Her sister may have construed this confession to refer to Mary’s financial support of Jane’s projects, but Mary’s generosity to Hull House was not unique. By 1893 the settlement was serving approximately two thousand people weekly, and Jane’s own funds had long since been depleted. However, she was successful in soliciting from a host of affluent people the sum of $100,000 a year, a huge amount of money in those days. Mary’s support was important, but it could not explain jane’s devotion to her, since many were generous.

Though Mary’s money may have helped somewhat to overcome the great imbalance of power between them, her biggest contribution to Jane Addams’s life and work was not financial. Rather, it was the very personal love Mary brought. The ordinarily stolid Jane revealed as much in an 1895 poem she wrote, remembering her state when they met and how Mary altered her:

 

One day I came into Hull House

    (No spirit whispered who was there)

And in the kindergarten room

    There sat upon a childish chair

A girl, both tall and fair to see

    (To look at her gives one a thrill).

But all I thought was, would she be

    Best fitted to lead club or drill?

You see, I had forgotten Love,

    And only thought of Hull House then.

 

That is the way with women folks

    When they attempt the things of men;

They grow intense and love the thing

    Which they so tenderly do rear,

And think that nothing lies beyond

    Which claims from them a smile or tear . . .

So was I blind and deaf those years

    To all save one absorbing care,

And did not guess what now I know

    Delivering love was sitting there!

 

As was true in her relationship with Ellen, Jane could achieve great things, but she needed a personal love that would not only nurture her but also put her in touch with her human side. The potential risk of such vulnerability was that it might interfere with her tremendous goals. But unlike heterosexual relationships, which could have hindered her ability to “attempt the things of men”—that is, to run a huge institution almost single-mindedly—her relationships first with Ellen and then with Mary were enabling.

What Mary Smith brought Jane Addams was as ineffable as deep emotional connections between two people frequently are. Several biographers have observed that there was “no affinity of mind” between Jane, a mature woman, and Mary, who was less than twenty years old when she first went to Hull House, in 1890. By all objective standards, they were never a match intellectually or in terms of personality. Mary became a trustee in 1895, financed a children’s building for Hull House, and regularly wrote sizable checks to contribute to the running of the institution. Dr. Alice Hamilton, a Hull House resident, described her as “one supremely lovely figure . . . the most universally beloved person.” But generosity and sweetness aside, she was not in Jane’s league. In their letters they seldom exchanged ideas, though Jane’s correspondence with other women is replete with intellectual content. But as Allen Davis observes, Jane “did not need someone to test her ideas against. . . . She needed someone who accepted her and wanted her the way she was.”

Indeed, she needed someone with whom she could be human rather than Saint Jane, as she increasingly became in the public view. For instance, only with Mary could she let down the necessary guise of humility. She could brag during a 1902 lecture trip, “I will confide to you alone that I have never spoken so well and so many times as during this trip. It has altogether been successful socially and financially and in ideas.” To whom else could she admit such personal feelings, such very human ego gratification in a cause that had to appear entirely altruistic in order to succeed?

Rather than exchanging ideas, Jane and Mary’s letters expressed longing to be together, mutual dependence, joy about their domestic arrangements, and an affinity that transcended intellectualism. “I bless you, dear, every time I think of you, which is all the time at present,” Jane wrote at the end of 1894. At the beginning of 1895 they took a trip together, after which Jane sent Mary a letter proclaiming, “I feel soberer and calmer than I have felt for a year. It is one more thing to thank you for.” Less than two weeks later, she wrote, “I quite long for you to come” to spend time near her again. And a few days after that, having gotten a confirmation from Mary that she was planning an extended visit to Hull House, Jane expressed her joyful anticipation, saying that whenever she “need[ed] cheering,” she would find it by repeating to herself Mary’s promise to be with her.

Mary clearly reciprocated Jane’s feelings. After a visit with Jane before she was scheduled to go south with her family, Mary wrote, “I came home with quite a glow at my heart. . . . You can never know what it is to me to have had you and to have you now.” Mary spoke in this same letter of being overcome by a “rush of emotion . . . when I think of you.” In 1896, she invited Jane to be a guest of the Smith family on a trip to Europe, promising that they would have time alone. “Mother and Father are going to abide quietly in one or two spots and I am prepared to go anywhere, from the North Cape to Greece. . . . This is a very fine plan,” she quipped, “and you’d better consider it. I will offer you bribes to the extent of my fortune.” When Jane accepted, Mary wrote, “When I think of your going away with us I am quite overcome. It seems too good to be true and I really can’t take it in.”

The two women traveled frequently together in subsequent years. Often work was combined with pleasure, and Jane involved Mary in various pursuits. On the 1896 trip, for example, she and Mary visited settlement houses in Europe, met labor leaders and writers such as Tolstoy, and, as she wrote to Ellen, together bought “a good deal of literature [in order to] ‘cram up’ before we meet the folks who have written the books.” Jane may truly have felt that the attractive Mary was something of an asset on professional trips; at any rate, she wished to suggest that idea to Mary. In 1897, for example, she implored Mary to accept with her “a very pressing invitation” from a Mrs. Ward to visit her in the West. Jane’s relationship with Mary was such by then that she could joke about Mrs. Ward, “She was enchanted at the prospect of your going. . . . You know she has a grande passion for you.” But Jane’s own grande passion can be heard in the exigent lines that followed: “Please, please don’t change your mind now after filling me with such joy.”

As Mary approached thirty, however, Jane began to feel the awkwardness of their situation. At the end of the nineteenth century, when women of the middle and upper classes seldom claimed a conscious lesbian identity, regardless of their feelings or behavior, those who had no particular talent and no great ambition were supposed to marry. Mary Smith had neither, yet she had no apparent interest in finding a husband. Her emotions were focused entirely on Jane. At one point, in 1899, when Mary was visiting Germany with her parents, Jane wrote to encourage her not to turn away the attentions of a Mr. Robert Wood, a Hull House volunteer who was enamored of her and who went to see her in Germany. Was it in ingenuousness or guilt that Jane declared, “Bro Wood’s letters have been so ardent with regard to you that I had perhaps cherished a dream which your letter of this morning doesn’t exactly encourage”?

Yet how could Jane have been anything other than relieved when Mary did not heed her advice regarding Robert Wood? What would have happened to their exclusive relationship if Mary had accepted Mr. Wood? Fortunately for Jane, she had no serious reason to worry about Mary’s defection to heterosexuality, and their bond continued to deepen. Only a few months later, she wrote to Mary, who had spent several days with her on a lecture trip in Wisconsin, “Dearest, It made me quite homesick [for you] to go by the hotel [in Milwaukee, where they had stayed] this morning. We did have a good time in it, didn’t we?” By 1902, Jane permitted herself to express her belief that they were wed to each other. She wrote to Mary, who was off in Europe again with relatives, “You must know, dear, how I long for you all the time. . . . There is reason in the habit of married folk keeping together.” Subsequent letters, particularly those written after the death of Mary’s mother, in 1904 (which freed Mary to spend more time with Jane), depict the couple emphatically as “married folk” who enjoy, in Jane’s terms, a “healing domesticity.”

Shortly after Mary’s mother died, Mary purchased a vacation home in Bar Harbor in both her name and Jane’s (Jane put a small amount of money into it, to make it officially “ours”). Jane’s enthusiasm over their shared abode was unique in its girlishness: “Our house—it quite gives me thrill to write the word,” she told Mary, exalting over the “really truly ownership” of their very own home. By then, on the rare occasions when they were separated by Jane’s business travels, they sent letters or telegrams to each other almost daily. Typically, Jane would tell Mary, as she did in a 1914 letter from Denver, “Dearest, I had a wave of real homesickness for you. . . . I wanted you very much.”

Jane Addams’s “marriage” to Mar)’ Rozet Smith did not end until March 1934, when Mary died of pneumonia, after more than forty years of life with Jane. Jane, who was herself ill at the time, was devastated, as she wrote to her nephew, James Linn: “I suppose I could have willed my heart to stop beating, but the thought of what she had been to me for so long kept me from being cowardly.” She survived Mary by only fourteen months.

 

Beyond Hull House

During her years with Mary Rozet Smith, Jane Addams became first a national and then an international figure. In 1904, as a result of her work against flagrant abuses of child labor, she was appointed to the board of trustees of the National Child Labor Committee. She led the committee in drawing up a model child labor bill that prohibited night work for children and contained provisions to enforce minimum age and maximum hours laws. In 1909 she became the first female president of the National Conference of Social Work (then called the National Conference of Charities and Corrections). That year she also played a major role in the fledgling National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The following year she was the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Yale. She also became one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1931, after more than forty years of promoting humanitarian concerns, she received the Nobel Peace Prize. It is no exaggeration to say, as magazine polls often did, that for many years of her life Jane Addams was considered “America’s greatest woman.”

Throughout all these years, Mary Smith was usually by Jane’s side, whether Jane was traveling to the capitals of Europe for her work in the international peace movement or traveling around America to promote the franchise or a variety of social causes. Although the two women lived together only after both of Mary’s parents died, even early in their relationship Jane often took respite from Hull House to spend time with Mary and Mr. and Mrs. Smith (who greatly admired her) in their Chicago mansion. In later years, Jane lived at this mansion on Walton Place most of the time, though she remained the spiritual head of Hull House.

During her years with Mary Rozet Smith, Jane Addams also became a prominent pacifist. Her residence in an immigrant neighborhood led her to feel deeply about the folly of war between nations. She was sanguine in her belief that the forced integration of immigrants in American cities had worked to tame the ferocity of their nationalism and that a similar forced internationalism, on a worldwide scale, could be made “an effective instrument in the cause of world-peace.” She lectured on the idea of a “united nations” as early as the start of the twentieth century, and in her 1907 book, Newer Ideals of Peace, she presented a blueprint for such an international remedy. She was opposed to World War I; through the Women’s Peace Party, which she founded in 1915, and the International Congress of Women at the Hague, over which she presided, she made great efforts to bring the war to a mediated end. Unlike Anna Shaw and Carrie Catt, she refused to compromise her pacifism even for the sake of winning the franchise. Because of her inveterate pacifism, she was cast out of the Daughters of the American Revolution, decried as being a Bolshevik by the right wing, and given a prominent position in their “Spiderweb” chart, which connected her to fifty other American “radicals” who were attempting “to destroy civilization and Christianity . . . [and] the government of the United States.”

When America entered the war, in 1917, the one federal post Addams was willing to accept was in the Department of Food Administration, for which she traveled around the country to encourage greater food production in order to aid starving war victims in Europe. She helped found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and was its president for twenty years. When she received the Nobel Prize for Peace, she donated half of her prize money to this group. Shortly before Addams’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt, honoring the twentieth anniversary of WILPF and Addams’s leadership, proclaimed from the White House, “When the day comes when difficulties are faced and settled without resorting to [war] . . . we shall look back in this country upon the leadership you have given us, Miss Addams, and be grateful for having had you live with us.”

Addams’s peace work bore little substantive fruit, Eleanor Roosevelt’s optimistic projection notwithstanding. Nevertheless, her settlement house concepts helped direct the government’s rethinking of its responsibilities to the weaker members of society. As early as 1897, Jane Addams was serving as a national conscience, pointing out that so much of what Hull House was doing—including child care and subsidized food programs for the poor—should be done all over the country and would be much better done by the federal government. She argued that private beneficence was good and necessary but not sufficient to deal with the disinherited of the urban world. New jobs in social work and reformist public policy were eventually created from the spirit she helped awaken in America, and many of those jobs were filled by women. Addams virtually paved the way not only for the Progressive movement but also for the liberalism that was a prominent political ideal in America for much of the twentieth century.

Daniel Levine has rightly observed in his book Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition, “People listened to her—not only because her words seemed right, but also because she had put her words into action at Hull House. She knew what she was talking about.” But more important, she knew how to maneuver within the limitations of her day: how to inspire other women so that collective female power might be created in what were virtually separatist institutions such as settlement houses, and how to bring that power to fruition on a large scale. She understood precisely how nineteenth-century female reformers could coerce those who inhabited the male spheres of power to take them seriously, to learn from the women how to “be better,” and to support their efforts by necessary legislation.

Before Jane Addams was chosen to second Theodore Roosevelt’s nomination as the Progressive Party’s presidential candidate in 1912, Roosevelt had written to her: “Will you let me say a word of very sincere thanks to you for the eminent sanity, good-humor and judgement you always display in pushing matters you have at heart? I have such awful times with reformers of the hysterical and sensational stamp, and yet I so thoroughly believe in reform, that I revel in dealing with anyone like you.” Roosevelt had perceived Addams as she wished to be perceived. Regardless of how radical her position was in awakening America’s social conscience, she understood how to make her argument with such calm rationality that it appeared self-evident.