Working as partners at Hull House, Addams and Starr drew national attention by creating a blueprint for social change, and in the wake of their success, hundreds of settlement houses sprang up all over the country. Addams and Starr maintained their relationship for about fifteen years, until they drifted apart. In the mid-1890s, Addams began a romantic involvement with Mary Rozet Smith, a younger, wealthy woman who was a benefactor of Hull House. This partnership--viewed as a marriage by both women, according to Faderman--lasted more than forty years, until Smith passed away from pneumonia. Addams herself died a little over a year later.

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Contemporary Legacies

Settlement house volunteers eventually became professional (that is, paid) social reform workers. Jane Addams in particular was highly influential in the development of the social work profession, which attracted mostly women. The settlement house movement continued to exist throughout the twentieth century, although as time passed social workers stopped living in the settlement houses themselves, and the name dropped out of use.

Today, the settlement house heritage lives on through institutions more popularly known as community or neighborhood centers (including local YMCA and YWCAs). Nevertheless, the goals of building community solidarity and providing local residents with much needed services have not changed. What does need to change, however, is the historical denial of the passionate, committed same-sex relationships that played such an important part in the lives of many American social welfare pioneers. It is only through the efforts of scholars such as Lillian Faderman that these issues are finally beginning to be addressed.

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.

Since the 1990s, Social Work has slowly become a more glbtq-friendly profession.

Women whom we would identify as lesbian or bisexual led the American movement for women's right to vote and hold political office.

American reformer, social worker, peace activist, and Nobel Laureate Jane Addams is remembered as the founder of Hull House in Chicago, but her involvement in same-sex relationships has consistently been hidden or minimized by biographers.

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.

Frances Kellor was a progressive activist and intellectual who is best known for having led the Americanization movement, but also contributed in a number of other areas.

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

A cornerstone of lesbian activism in the 1970s, the concept of the woman-identified woman expressed the need for women to define themselves without reference to male-dominated societal structures.