Out Spotlight LXVII

Today's OutSpotlight Jane Addams. Addams was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and perhaps the most famous social worker from the United States. While she did not publicly come out as people do today, but for her time she would have been.

Jane Addams was born in 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois. She has been described as a sickly child, with a spinal curvature. Her mother passed away when she was two years old and drew close to her father, her three surviving sisters and her brother.

Addams was a bright young girl who dreamed of attending Smith College in Massachusetts but her father would not allow her to go so far from home, so she attended a school closer to her family . At an all-female boarding school she learned the importance of female friendships and began her life-long friendship with Ellen Gates Starr, co-founder of Hull House. Although many of her classmates dropped out of school to get married, there is little evidence that Addams ever dated a member of the opposite sex.

Addams went on to study medicine after college but found the work hard and uninspiring. She returned to Cedarville, as women of her era did, to take care of her family. After her father died, Jane experienced depression and without a sense of purpose. She desperately wanted to make a difference in the world. During this her stepmother took her to Europe to recover and study art while her spirit began to return, but she still questioned her purpose in life.

After returning from Europe, she resumed friendship with Ellen Starr, now a teacher. A female love of Starr's had moved away and she was heartbroken. She wrote to Jane, "The first real experience I ever had in my life of any real pain in parting, came with separating from her. I don't speak of it because people don't understand it. People would understand if it were a man." Soon Addams would become the object of Starr's affection. It is not clear whether she returned the affection.

Starr and Addams traveled to London together and there Addams visited Toynbee Hall, the settlement house that inspired her to start Hull House. Hull House's purpose was two-fold. It's primary purpose was to serve the poor inner city residents. Its other purpose would be a cure for the uselessness she and other educated women of her time experienced. Hull House on was founded on Halsted Street in Chicago in 1889.

Previously, social work was based on a "Friendly Visitor" model. The wealthy would visit the poor and model for them behavior that would help them better their situation. Addams came to see that poverty was not due to character deficits, but social conditions that needed to be changed. So in addition to helping people meet their immediate needs, Hull House worked for social change, addressing such issues as child labor, public health reform, garbage collection, labor laws and race relations.

The term lesbian was coined in 1890, one year after Addams founded Hull House. Although she would not have used the term to define herself, by today's standards, Jane Addams would be a lesbian. Mary Rozet Smith arrived at Hull House one day in 1890, the daughter of a wealthy paper manufacturer. Over the years she became Addams' devoted companion, a "Boston Marriage", virtually playing the role of a traditional wife: tending to her when she was ill, handling her social correspondence, making travel arrangements.

Unfortunately, it will never be known the full extent of her relationship with Mary Smith. Toward the end of her life, she destroyed most of Mary's letters to her. Perhaps trying to cover up a sexual component of their relationship. "I miss you dreadfully and am yours 'til death," Addams wrote to Smith. Smith wrote back, "You can never know what it is to me to have had you and to have you...I feel quite a rush of emotion when I think of you."

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of Addams's life and the one which won her the most notoriety was her involvement in the peace movement. Declaring herself a pacifist and speaking out against World War I. Although she would eventually win a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts, it was an unpopular stance to take in 1914.

Addams believed women had a social responsibility to work for peace because working men would never be against war. She took on a leadership role in the Woman's Peace Party. In March 1915 she was invited to speak at an International Congress of Women in the Netherlands. Addams presided over the event and one participant said, "She towered above all the others and again and again when she rose to speak and when she closed the audience would stand and applaud...She led without dominating and with extraordinary parliamentary skill clarified and interpreted for the polyglot congress of women."

Jane Addams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. True to her cause, Jane gave all her prize money away.

Addams had a heart attack in 1926. She never fully regained her health. As a matter of fact, she was being admitted to a Baltimore hospital on the very day, December 10, 1931, that the Nobel Peace Prize was being awarded to her in Oslo. She died in 1935. The funeral was held in the courtyard of Hull-House.