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On November 13, 2008, Jane Addams will be inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. This honor recognizes her membership in Chicago's sexual-minority community, which includes lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Chicagoans, past, present, living and dead. The essay that follows is drawn from a talk that Addams biographer Louise W. Knight gave at Chicago's gay and lesbian center, the Center on Halsted Street, earlier this year, before Addams had been chosen for the honor. It makes the case for her membership in the lesbian community.
In 1980 lesbian poet Adrienne Rich looked at American history and saw a gaping hole. She wanted to know “how and why women’s choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, tribe, has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding and disguised.” She called for scholars to deal with lesbian experience as “[natural] and a reality, and as a source of knowledge and power available to women.”
During the last 28 years, that gaping hole has begun to be filled. Historians Lillian Faderman, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Estelle Freedman, John D’Emilio, and Blanche Wiesen Cook, among others, have re-researched and re-interpreted the history and brought it into print. Some of their work deals with the white upper-middle-class women social reformers of the 19th and 20th centuries who had romantic female life-partners, including Jane Addams, Anna Howard Shaw, Carrie Chapman Catt, Frances Willard, Frances Kellor, M. Carey Thomas, and Mary Emma Woolley. If you do not know about these women, I recommend Lillian Faderman’s book To Believe in Women, where you can read all about them and their partners. The stories of working class lesbians are also coming to the light, thanks to the fine work of Allan Berube, Madeline D. Davis, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, and, most recently, Anne Enke.
And what of the physical side of these partnerships? In researching the intimate relations of late-nineteenth-century upper-middle-class female reformers, historians have found plenty of evidence that they slept together, and hugged and kissed, but often no unambiguous evidence survives of sexual contact. May we still call these women “lesbian”? Some say no because the term and the identity did not exist during much of their lifetimes. Setting that issue aside, I see two benefits to making room in the definitions of lesbian relations for romantic relations that are nonsexual. For one thing, the inclusive definition highlights the deeper dimensions of same-sex attachment and identity that lesbianism is also about. For another, the more inclusive definition increases the honesty of society’s conversation about the nature of intimate love. For is it not the case that heterosexual love, as many people live it, sometimes lacks a sexual dimension? Yet that fact is hardly discussed. Perhaps the gay and lesbian communities can help the straight community, as they often have before, by speaking the truth that straight people do not want to hear.
Was Jane Addams a lesbian in either sense? I would like to take up that question in a broader context: what was the place of love in her life and thought? It seems to me that Addams thought about, and explored, three functions of love: intimate love; affectionate, cooperative love; and love of humanity, what we might call love of the stranger.
• Addams experienced romantic, intimate love with two woman partners -- Ellen Gates Starr and Mary Rozet Smith. While the partnership with Starr (as distinct from the friendship) lasted only six years, they had expected it to be a lifetime commitment. The partnership with Smith began just as the other with Starr was ending. Jane Addams was 33 and Smith, 24. The relationship lasted 40 years, until Mary’s death in 1934.
• Addams experienced affectionate cooperative love through her political activism. For decades she worked with men and women trade union leaders, union members, club members, social workers, clergy, and others to advance women’s suffrage, end child labor, improve worker and immigrant rights, and promote civil rights, free speech and
peace.
• Addams experienced the third function of love – love of humanity – as the vital spur to her work for social justice. When she was a youth, it was an ideal her imagination seized on; when she was a young woman, it was a seemingly impossible goal to achieve; and when she was a mature adult, it was a rule of living, a guide to her every human interaction.
With these diverse meanings in mind, I believe that love was Jane Addams’s most absorbing passion. She was one of those rare people who was thinking about the importance of love all the time -- not always succeeding in being loving, of course, but steadily trying. In this essay, I will consider Addams’s experiences with only the first of these three functions of love – her experiences with romantic, intimate love.
Brief Biography of Jane Addams
Born in 1860 and dying in 1935, Jane Addams was one of the nation’s leading social activists. Living during the Progressive Era, she advised presidents and governors, testified before Congress and state legislatures, met with officials behind the scenes, organized national bodies to lobby on issues, marched in the streets, did grass-roots organizing, and served on the platform committee of the Progressive Party in 1912. Through political action, she significantly influenced public policy.
In addition, she was
• The co-founder of Hull House, the nation’s first settlement house, right on this street, down at the 800 S. block, and a leader of the American
settlement movement;
• the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,
• a mentor to Eleanor Roosevelt, a friend of John Dewey, the philosopher, admired by Williams James, the psychologist, a colleague of W.E. B DuBois and Ida B. Wells
• an advisor to all the presidents from McKinley through FDR,
• the author of 11 books, and
• the co-founder of the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom, the Women’s Trade Union League, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the NAACP
She was also a white upper-middle class woman, and she arrived on Halsted Street in 1889 with many of the prejudices that such a background nurtured. She was committed to ending racial segregation in all of its forms, but her perspectives on class and race were narrow in other ways. She did not understand white privilege, for example, or the extent to which the cultural superiority she felt towards working class people was the result of an accident of birth and, in any case, no superiority at all. In my biography, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2005), which covers the first half of her life, I tell the story of what she learned about these and other things.
Romantic, Intimate Love
In our highly sexualized times, to think about intimate love is to think about sexuality. But it has not always been thus. As John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman have explained in their wonderful book, Intimate Matters, “The dominant meaning of sexuality has changed during our history from a primary association with reproduction within families to a primary association with emotional intimacy and physical pleasure for individuals.” At the same time, the meaning of intimate love has also changed. Addams’s own experiences and views illustrate the kind of intimate love -- highly spiritualized, disembodied –to which she and many others of her background and time aspired.
Still, the question of Addams’s sexuality remains. Whether she ever had sexual contact with anyone must always remain unknowable; she may have. While no evidence survives to prove it, that does not mean she did not. As John D’Emilio has noted, firsthand accounts of past sexual experiences are rare. I propose to make an educated guess about her sexuality based on two things: 1) what we know about her most intimate relations and 2) what her attitudes towards sexuality were in general. I take up this question because it is of interest at present. But I suspect that 50 years from now our curiosity will seem a bit prurient. I have yet to read a biography of a straight man that dwelt much on his married sex life. (His affairs, of course, are another subject entirely.)
The first thing to note is that when Jane Addams was in her teens and early twenties she was not romantically interested in boys, or men, or in the idea of falling in love, period. She read many books and wrote about them in letters but never mentioned any of the stories of love affairs she encountered; she disapproved of the romantic schoolgirl crushes that she saw all around her in college. Addams had one boyfriend in her life that we know about, boyfriend at least from his point of view. His name was Rollin Salisbury, and he was a leader of his class at Beloit College, the men’s school down the road, when Addams was at Rockford College. Soon after they both graduated, he proposed marriage and she turned him down.
In general, Addams was not sanguine about the benefits of marriage for women who, like her, wanted to pursue careers. She would later write about the difficult, forced choice women of her generation faced between marriage and a career. Men either “did not want… to marry women of the new type … or thought that women could not do both.” But in the next sentence she made it clear that, for her at least, no husband would do for her -- she wanted freedom. Early career women, she wrote with a touch of pride, possessed “pioneer qualities of character and sometimes the divine urge of intellectual hunger.” All her imagination and determination were channeled into her ambition.
Given these views, we can easily suppose Addams might have avoided all partnerships, even one with a woman, all of her life. Nearly all her close friends did. They put their careers first, over their emotional lives. What caused her to partner with Ellen? First there was the utter loneliness of her twenties, and her need to break free of the restraints of her family. But there was also her realization that she needed someone of like mind to believe in her ideas if she were to overcome her self-doubts and accomplish her dreams. After suffering from depression for several years after graduating from college, she wrote her stepbrother from Europe, “[I am becoming] more convinced all the time ...[that] there are certain feelings and conclusions which can never be reached except in an atmosphere of affection and congeniality.” Soon after, she wrote Ellen Gates Starr, “I am more convinced every day that friendship … is the main thing in life.” A few years later she would express her belief that close friendships were essential to her own intellectual development. She wrote, “Intellectual life requires for its expansion… the influence of the affection of others.”
Her friendship with Ellen deepened soon after Jane returned from Europe. They spent a week together and afterwards, they were more openly loving and devoted to one another in their letters. Starr was in many ways the right person for Addams to choose for her first intimate relationship. They shared a love of travel, books, a deepening interest in religion, and high ideals, but while Jane was cool and detached, Ellen was passionate; she wore her emotions on her sleeve. Ellen was also freely, if casually, romantic – throughout her life she often mentioned in her letters, playfully, that she was falling in love with someone, usually a woman.
Finally, Ellen was a person of great enthusiasms. When Jane confessed to Ellen her secret dream to start a settlement house, Ellen’s excitement about her vague idea made it seem, suddenly “convincing and tangible.” Ellen agreed on the spot to join her in the adventure. They decided to lead this new settlement life together in the spirit of social Christianity to which they were both devoted. We can hear that commitment in what Jane wrote to Ellen in 1889: “Let us love each other through thick and thin and work out a salvation.”
Their early love for each other amounted to a mutual admiration society. Ellen admired Jane’s spiritual strength, writing to her cousin, “Jane strengthens the weak knees. I don’t know how I should live my life without her.” Jane admired Ellen’s ebullient and impatient “zeal.” Ellen gave Jane confidence and courage. Jane wrote to Ellen, speaking of her friend in the third person, “I think [often] ... of the soul… without whom I get on so badly.” They thought of themselves as a couple and as each other’s new family. They now began sending news of each other to their blood families.
They also shared a bed and a bedroom without the necessity to do so. And if they were sharing a bed, then we naturally ask: what about sex? That possibility – viewed as a dangerous temptation – was obvious to at least one person – Starr’s cousin in Massachusetts, Mary Allen. Just as Starr and Addams were to move into their new home on Halsted Street, Allen wrote to admonish Starr for failing to consider the physical temptations that would be hard to avoid in her new intimate life with Addams. Mary’s letter does not survive, but Starr’s reply does. She wrote, “About the weakness of the flesh, which you think I have not considered - probably I haven’t. I don’t quite know how to. Perhaps it’s as well not to. I do know, however, the strength of the beautiful spiritual life beside me[.]…I couldn’t do this [start a settlement house] without her.”
What kind of love was this? Addams and Starr and their contemporaries, drawing on classical Greek ideas, called it Platonic love. When she was 15, Addams had written in a letter, “ I am a great admirer of Platonic love or rather, sacred friendship. I think it is much higher than what is generally implied in the word love.” By “higher” she meant more spiritual and less of the body. In Platonic love, which was much admired in educated circles in Addams’s day, two people aspired to elevate their sexual urges and sensual feelings to a higher plane, to love the beautiful and the excellent not in one body but in the beauty of the individual soul and in the wider world. As one advice book of the day put it, the imagination “exalted the soul, instead of flaming the senses.” Plato called this “sublimation.” It was considered a good thing.
In her forties, Addams was still a believer in Platonic love. In 1909, she invoked Diotima’s famous speech about love in Plato’s Symposium to explain her hope that city youth find a way to avoid sensuality and sex. Following Diotima, she proposed that the “sex impulse” as she called it, be redirected, so that it could “awaken the imagination and the heart.” The sex impulse, she wrote, can “overflow into neighboring fields of consciousness.”
To us, in our times, the idea of aspiring to Platonic love is peculiar. We are convinced that nothing is more transcendent than sex. But we will not begin to understand Jane Addams’s attitude towards intimate love if we do not grasp the kind of intimacy she most aspired to – the meeting of two souls, the connection of two spirits, what she sometimes called “the intercourse of two minds.” Even in casual encounters, she sought this kind of connection. She wrote, “We go to social gatherings, hoping that somehow, with somebody, we can have the real intercourse of mind with mind.”
In her partnership with Mary Rozet Smith, Addams took her Platonic love life to a new level. Mary was beautiful in a way that Ellen was not, both physically and spiritually. Platonic love was more possible with Mary. (Addams did love beauty). And though both Ellen and Mary had deep souls, Mary’s was more truly embodied in her daily presence. She was described by many as a gentle, generous, loving person, someone that people at Hull House often turned to her for help.
In Mary Rozet Smith, Addams had found the love of her life. She wrote her often how much she missed her and thought about her when they were apart. She told her sister Alice once how much Smith meant to her. “She is so good to me that I would find life a different thing without her.” And Mary felt the same. She wrote to Jane, “You can never know what it is to me to have had you and to have you now.” When Mary was away one year traveling in Europe, Jane wrote her, “You must know, dear, how I long for you all the time… There is reason in the habit of married folk keeping together.” Mary loved Jane Addams for who she was, accepted her, flaws and all, listened to her and believed in her. She also brought out the gentleness in Addams. They both found life impossible without each other. After Mary died, Jane told her nephew, “I thought over everything. I suppose I could have willed my heart to stop beating, and I longed to relax into doing that, but the thought of what she had been to me for so long kept me from being cowardly.” She survived Mary a year; it was the most she could manage.
Of course, some may believe that if they had had sexual relations, that would have also deepened their love, but, again, that belief tells us more about our times and our ideas than theirs. They thought that Platonic love was the highest form of love. And they aimed to practice it. We cannot know if they succeeded all the time, but there is an observation Addams makes in her passage about Diotima that hints that she at least knew firsthand of the difficulties involved. She wrote, “It is neither a short nor easy undertaking to substitute the love of beauty for mere desire, to place the mind above the senses.” For us, in the 21st century, this perspective is worth contemplating, especially because many couples today, both gay and straight, eventually arrive at this same place – a place where the intercourse of souls is considered the highest form of love.
How Heroes are Hidden
Biographers of Jane Addams have all acknowledged that she had close friendships with Ellen Gates Starr and Mary Rozet Smith. Several have noted how emotionally dependent she was on Smith for love and support. But the broader social meaning of Addams’s lifelong commitment to another woman has not been addressed until recently. The long silence about the historical significance of Addams’s intimate love life, with its obvious implication, to modern eyes, of lesbianism, is not surprising. It is linked to the changing history of sexuality during the years biographers have been writing.
When Jane Addams was born, there was no stigma associated with upper-middle-class women living together as life-long partners. These arrangements, which included sexual relations in some cases, were not viewed as sexual. They were common enough that they had a name – they were called Boston marriages. This accepting attitude ended during Addams’s lifetime. Interestingly enough, the shift, which began in the late 1890s, coincided with a broader backlash against women in general. Contributing to this hostility towards same sex partnerships was the work of social scientists. As we know, they were busy in the early 1900s establishing homosexuality, whether male or female, as a disease, and devising a new scientific terminology to convey these views as science.
By the 1920s, women who had established Boston marriages in the earlier, balmy times were laying low, even as younger women began to develop closeted lesbian identities. Things were not so difficult for Jane Addams because she and Mary did not live together year round. They owned a summer house in Maine together, but during the rest of the year visited each other’s houses. But prominent women who lived with their lovers while leading institutions now found that arrangement a political liability. The most obvious case was that of Mary Woolley, president of Mount Holyoke College, whose partnership with an English professor at the school became increasingly controversial. Thus it was that in the twentieth-century lesbian women – and of course gay men as well -- lost what gay playwright Terrence McNally has called the final civil right: the right to love as anyone else loves.
Twentieth century historians for the most part reflected their times. That which was taboo was not discussed. They ignored the record of these relationships, which often survived in personal papers. As Adrienne Rich’s frustration in 1980 indicates, it would be many decades before the scales would begin to fall from society’s eyes.
Gay and lesbian historians have led the way in unearthing these relationships; straight historians have gradually followed. It has been a revelation and a joy to learn about the remarkable contributions gay men and lesbian women have made to the United States. We all want to see ourselves reflected in the great accomplishments of history; now, finally, the gay and lesbian communities are beginning to be able to have that deeply human satisfaction. Jane Addams, too, belongs to lesbian history.
 Louise W. Knight is an independent scholar and author of a biography of Jane Addams's formative years, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2005; www.louisewknight.com). She often speaks about Addams at colleges and universities and to civic groups. Her new book, to be published by W.W. Norton on the 150th anniversary of Jane Addams's birth, September, 2010, is a short full life of the reformer.
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