Outing Jane Addams - Was the founder of Hull House a lesbian? And does it matter?

Outing Jane Addams - Was the founder of Hull House a lesbian? And does it matter?
By Nara Schoenberg
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
Published February 6, 2007

The portrait hanging above a marble fireplace at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum shows a calm and self-possessed young woman in a billowing lemon chiffon dress, a soft summer sky behind her, a faraway look in her eyes.

Was she a dear friend and key financial supporter of pioneering social reformer Jane Addams?

Would it be more accurate to say that the woman in yellow, Chicago heiress Mary Rozet Smith, was "married" to Addams for more than 30 years?

Were the two women lovers?

Such questions, long intriguing to Addams scholars, have now reached Hull House in the form of the new "Was Jane Addams a Lesbian? Project" in which museum visitors are invited to choose among captions -- ranging from the discreet to the direct -- for the Smith portrait.

"I would never be able to answer [the question, was Addams gay?] with a yes or no, and that's what I've learned from this whole experience," says Lisa Lee, director of the Hull-House Museum at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"Personally, I have no problem calling her a lesbian, but I would have to qualify that and say, `I don't think she would identify as a lesbian in the way the word is used now.' But because of her long relationships with initially [Hull House co-founder] Ellen Gates Starr, and with Mary, I would say that I think she was."

Scholars generally agree that Addams and Smith owned a home in Maine, traveled as a pair, and spent more than 30 years in a loving and committed relationship.

"I long for you all the time and especially during the last three weeks," Addams wrote to Smith in a letter sent while Smith was in Europe, according to Allen F. Davis' biography "American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams."

"There is reason in the habit of married folks keeping together," Addams also wrote.

What historians say they don't know is whether the partnership between Smith and Addams was sexual. As Louise W. Knight points out in her biography "Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy," Addams lived in an era when it was not unusual for women to set up house together in lifelong partnerships, sometimes called Boston marriages.

These 19th Century "marriages" could have a romantic element but were not considered sexual.

In the absence of letters, diaries or other documents proving, conclusively, that the Addams-Smith relationship had an erotic component, one scholar says that it's time to move on to other aspects of the Addams story.

"The notion that we have to be this historical `National Enquirer' and try to ferret out all the secrets -- in the interest of what?" says University of Chicago ethics professor Jean Bethke Elshtain, author of "Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy."

She finds the "Was Jane Addams a Lesbian? Project" "very strange" and worries that speculation about Addams' love life will overshadow the known facts of her extraordinary public career, which included co-founding and leading Hull House -- the groundbreaking social service and cultural center in a struggling section of Chicago -- and winning the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize.

"It just seems very odd with a great woman civic leader that people would become obsessed with what may or may not have happened in her intimate life," Elshtain says.

But other scholars say that Addams' personal life is a topic of legitimate historic interest.

An important process

"It's too central to anyone's life to make a primary/emotional/commitment/lifetime partnership to say that we shouldn't be interested in it," Knight says.

"If you look at how marriages are treated [in the cases of] prominent men; if you look at how Betty Ford's relationship with President Ford was treated, it was made a big deal."

"Would we say it's none of our business that they had a wonderful marriage and the family had to face her about her alcoholism? That tells us something about the kind of man he is, and it rounds out our understanding of him as an important figure."

In the case of Addams, Mary Rozet Smith is an important part of the story, according to Grinnell College history professor Victoria Bissell Brown, author of "The Education of Jane Addams."

"[Jane Addams] could not have done what she did without Mary Rozet Smith. Period. No way," Brown says.

"She needed that emotional support; she needed that person who literally followed her around with the crackers and the shawl and the Kleenex and `Are you OK, Jane?' and `Do you need to sit down?' She needed a wife -- and she had a great wife."

Knight believes that Addams understood herself to be married to a woman and that the two women were life partners. Whether or not that means they were lesbians depends on your definition of the word, she says.

Knight says she doubts that Addams would meet a definition hinging on sex. But if your definition hinges on emotional attachment, then, yes, Addams was a lesbian.

"What matters is that she had a primary lifetime commitment to another woman, that she offered that model to the world, she believed in it and it vastly enriched her life. They were devoted. They loved each other profoundly. After Mary died, everyone said, `Gee, is Jane going to survive?'"

Addams did but only for a while. She died the next year.

On a recent day at Hull House, the huge, lushly romantic portrait of Smith and a relatively small and stark companion portrait of Addams, both commissioned by Addams, hung over fireplaces on the first floor.



In their words

Asked to choose among captions characterizing Smith as Addams' companion, partner or life partner, about 60 visitors had responded in writing, with the majority leaning toward the middle ground:

"Mary Rozet Smith was Jane Addams's partner and one of the top financial supporters of Hull-House," the most popular caption says.

"They shared a deep emotional attachment and affection for one another. Only about one half of the first generation of college women ever married men. Many formed emotional, romantic and practical attachments to other women. ... "

Lee, the museum director, likes that caption, which, she says, speaks of the Addams-Smith relationship in the "most honest way."

"I don't want to be guilty, at the helm of this museum, of keeping [Addams] in the closet -- but I don't want to be guilty of outing her just for shallow identity politics [either]," she says.

"There's so much at stake. ... What was the truth? And why do we care?"

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Who was Jane Addams?

Jane Addams left her mark on Chicago, indeed the world, for her work as a social reformer. Born Sept. 6, 1860, into a well-do-to family in the northwest Illinois town of Cedarville, she co-founded the social settlement Hull House, at the corner of Polk and Halsted Streets, in 1889 with her friend Ellen Gates Starr. Aided by financial contributions from friends such as Mary Rozet Smith and others, Addams brought needed social services to Chicago's poor working-class immigrant community, later expanding her work to lobby for protective legislation for women and children. A staunch pacifist, she became chairman of the Women's Peace Party in 1915 and the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize -- in 1931. Addams died in Chicago on May 21, 1935.

Who was Mary Rozet Smith?

Smith, too, came from a family of means, spending her early years traveling abroad. She was born Dec. 23, 1868, in a house on Walton Place, the only daughter of Charles and Sarah Smith. As a young woman, with no college degree and no particular passion or goals, she "drifted to the [Hull] House in the course of its first year," according to Addams' biographer James Linn, becoming one of its major financial supporters and helping out in its music school and nursery. The two women often traveled together, but Smith never lived in Hull House. She died of pneumonia Feb. 22, 1934 in her Chicago home.

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nschoenberg@tribune.com