The latter relationship began in the early 1900s and lasted until Smith's death in 1934. Its intensity is detailed by the letters and poems that the two women wrote to each other.

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Although Addams and Smith lived at a time when lesbian identity was still being shaped, they clearly understood themselves as forming a married couple. Addams wrote to Smith during a period of separation: "You must know, dear, how I long for you all the time, and especially during the last three weeks. There is reason in the habit of married folks keeping together."

Addams was honored for her work for world peace at the twentieth anniversary congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in May 1935. Soon after the congress, on May 21, 1935, she died, aged 74. Her passing was mourned throughout the world, but especially by the poor of Chicago.

The vigorous Midwestern metropolis of Chicago has been a center of gay and lesbian community and organizing since the early part of the twentieth century.

Nursing, which has been both welcoming and hostile to gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered, is important to glbtq history.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, intimate, exclusive, and often erotic romantic friendships between women were largely perceived as normal and socially acceptable.

It is significant for glbtq history that a number of the women volunteers in the settlement house movement--which flourished at the turn of the twentieth century--formed close, lasting relationships with one another while living and working together.

Boston marriages--romantic unions between women that were usually monogamous but not necessarily sexual--flourished in the late nineteenth-century between women who tended to be college-educated, feminist, financially independent, and career-minded.

Lillian Wald, an American public health nurse and social reformer, is the model of a Victorian-era lesbian active in the settlement house movement.