By Matt Simonette

Staff writer

The legacy of one of Chicago’s foremost social justice pioneers was the subject when community members met at the Center on Halsted May 7 for the forum “Love on Halsted,” about the life and work of Jane Addams, founder of Hull House and the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Louise Knight, an independent scholar and author of “Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy,” discussed Addams’ work and how it was influenced by her personal relationships, especially one with Mary Rozet Smith, her closest love, with whom she was involved for many years.

Addams and Smith were involved with what’s been traditionally referred to as a Boston Marriage, according to Knight. Their relationship, she said, was characterized by an emotional intimacy but supposedly lacked a sexual component.

“They thought platonic love was the highest form of love,” Knight said, adding that Addams and Smith “sought a real intercourse of mind with mind.”

She added that it was clear from Addams’ letters that she was not interested in men.

“She did not want any man to have the power to clip her wings,” Knight said.

When Addams arrived in 1889 for her work on Halsted Street, Knight said, “she held rather narrow views on class and race,” stemming from her privileged upbringing. But, gradually, as her work at Hull House progressed and she began her passionate commitment to social justice and reform, those views broadened.

“She spoke daily with many people,” Knight said. “She slowly ceased to see them as ‘the Other.’ She was humbled (in her work) and felt a new sense of connection with her own humanity,” she added.

Addams could be secretive and went public with few details about her private life. She destroyed most of her correspondence with Smith after Smith’s death. She did give a number of letters to her nephew, who was her first biographer, but told him to destroy them after he completed his book. He never carried out her wishes.

Panelists at the forum went on to discuss how Addams and Smith’s relationship might be reclaimed for GLBT history, though it occurred before many ideas about lesbian identity were even developed.

According to Beth Kelly of DePaul University, Addams’ relationship is difficult to define “because of the notion of female sexlessness and the pathologization of homosexuality” that social scientists at the time were engaged in.

But shifting our perception of Addams—naming her as a lesbian—“is an act of recovery and reclamation that provides (the GLBT community) with a role model,” Kelly said.

“We are reclaiming identities that culture has taught us to despise,” Kelly said. In the GLBT community, she added, “We need role models.”

Bill Greaves, of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations Advisory Council on LGBT Issues, addressed why naming Addams’ relationship is pertinent to Chicago’s GLBT community—she has been posthumously nominated to the Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame, but the idea has been met with resistence.

“For the past few years, she’s been nominated, and we’ve had wonderful conversations about it,” Greaves said.

He read a letter from historian John D’Emilio that urged Addams’ induction. Denying her place there, D’Emilio wrote, blamed Addams “for living then rather than living now.”