Starr, Ellen Gates (1859-1940)

US social reformer. In 1898, along with Jane Addams she established Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago's West Side. For the next 30 years, she was the principal coordinator for cultural activities there - promoting everything from great books reading clubs to bookbinding - but she soon broadened her concerns to become an activist for child labour and labour issues in general.

She was born near Laona, Illinois. Growing up in an Illinois village, she was influenced by her aunt, Eliza Allen Starr, a writer and lecturer on Christian art who lived in Chicago, to enroll in the Rockford Female Seminary in Illinois 1877-78, where she met Jane Addams. For several years she taught at a girls' school in Chicago. She spent several years corresponding with Jane Addams travelled with her to Europe in 1888. She eventually joined the Socialist Party and then in 1920 - after a lifetime of searching for a congenial religion - she joined the Catholic Church. After a crippling ailment, she retired in 1930 to a Catholic convent in New York.