When they returned to Chicago in 1889, they co-founded Hull House as a kindergarten, then a day nursery, an infancy care centre, and a center for continuing education for adults.

[4][5] Starr was also active in the campaign to reform child labor laws and industrial working conditions in Chicago.

[7] The director of the Hull-House Museum at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Lisa Lee, has argued that the relationship was romantic and a lesbian one.

[6][9] The intensity of the relationship dwindled when Addams met Mary Rozet Smith (who had been Starr's student at Miss Kirkland's School).

Founded by Emily Malbone Morgan, the Companions included a number of influential reformers from around the United States, such as Vida Scudder, and Mary Simkhovitch.

[10] Although Starr possessed an interest in Roman Catholicism for many years, it was only in 1920, when she believed the Church was seriously teaching social justice, that she converted.

[11] In 1931, seriously ill, Starr retired to a Roman Catholic convent in Suffern, New York, where she was cared for by the Society of the Holy Child Jesus.

It was transformed as the play's "Ellen Gates Starr High School", named for the co-founder of Hull House.