Ellen Gates Starr Biography

Ellen Gates Starr Biography Ellen Starr was born in Illinois in 1859.  Her father encouraged her in thinking about democracy and social responsibility, and his sister, Ellen’s aunt Eliza Starr, encouraged her to pursue higher education.  There were few women’s colleges, especially in the Midwest; in 1877, Ellen Starr began her studies at Rockford Female Seminary with a curriculum equivalent to that of many men’s colleges. In her first year of study at Rockford Female Seminary, Ellen Starr met and became close friends with Jane Addams.  Ellen Starr left after a year, when her family could no longer afford to pay tuition.  She became a teacher in Mount Morris, Illinois, in 1878, and the following year at a girls’ school in Chicago.  She also read such authors as Charles Dickens and John Ruskin and began shaping her own ideas about labor and other social reforms, and, following her aunt’s lead, about art as well. Jane Addams Her friend, Jane Addams, meanwhile, graduated from Rockford Seminary in 1881, tried to attend a Woman’s Medical College, but left in ill health.  She toured Europe and lived for a while in Baltimore, all the while feeling restless and bored and wanting to apply her education.  She decided to return to Europe for another trip and invited her friend Ellen Starr to go with her. Hull House On that trip, Addams and Starr visited Toynbee Settlement Hall and London’s East End.  Jane had the vision of starting a similar settlement house in America and talked Starr into joining her.  They decided on Chicago, where Starr had been teaching and found an old mansion that had become used for storage, originally owned by the Hull family – thus, Hull House.  They took up residence on September 18, 1889, and began â€Å"settling† in with the neighbors, to experiment with how to best serve the people there, mostly poor and working-class families. Ellen Starr led reading groups and lectures, on the principle that education would help uplift the poor and those who worked at low wages. She taught labor reform ideas, but also literature and art. She organized art exhibits. In 1894, she founded the Chicago Public School Art Society to get art into public school classrooms.  She traveled to London to learn bookbinding, becoming an advocate for the handicrafts as a source of pride and meaning.  She tried to open a book bindery at Hull House, but it was one of the failed experiments. Labor Reform She also became more involved in labor issues in the area, involving immigrants, child labor and safety in the factories and sweatshops in the neighborhood. In 1896, Starr joined the garment workers’ strike in support of the workers. She was a founding member of the Chicago chapter of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) in 1904.  In that organization, she, like many other educated women, worked in solidarity with the often-uneducated women factory workers, supporting their strikes, helping them file complaints, raising funds for food and milk, writing articles and otherwise publicizing their conditions to the wider world. In 1914, in a strike against Henrici Restaurant, Starr was among those arrested for disorderly conduct. She was charged with interfering with a police officer, who claimed she had used violence against him and â€Å"tried to frighten him† by telling him to â€Å"leave them girls be!†Ã‚  She, a frail woman of at best a hundred pounds, did not look to those in court like someone who could frighten a policeman from his duties, and she was acquitted. Socialism After 1916, Starr was less active in such confrontational situations. While Jane Addams generally did not get involved in partisan politics, Starr joined the Socialist Party in 1911 and was a candidate in the 19th ward for the alderman’s seat on the Socialist ticket.  As a woman and a Socialist, she did not expect to win but used her campaign to draw connections between her Christianity and Socialism and to advocate for more fair working conditions and treatment of all.  She was active with the Socialists until 1928. Religious Conversion Addams and Starr disagreed about religion, as Starr moved from her Unitarian roots in a spiritual journey that took her to conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1920. Later Life She withdrew from public view as her health grew poorer.  A spinal abscess led to surgery in 1929, and she was paralyzed after the operation.  Hull House was not equipped or staffed for the level of care that she needed, so she moved to the Convent of the Holy Child in Suffern, New York. She was able to read and paint and maintain a correspondence, remaining at the convent until her death in 1940. Ellen Gates Starr Facts Known for:  co-founder of Chicago’s Hull House, with Jane AddamsOccupation:  settlement house worker, teacher, reformerDates:  March 19, 1859 - 1940Also known as: Ellen StarrReligion: Unitarian, then Roman CatholicOrganizations:  Hull House, Women’s Trade Union LeagueEducation: Rockford Female Seminary Family Mother: Susan Gates ChildsFather: Caleb Allen Starr, farmer, businessman, active in the GrangeAunt: Eliza Allen Starr, art scholar

How To Stress Syllables in Japanese Pronunciation

How To Stress Syllables in Japanese Pronunciation For non-native Japanese speakers, learning the cadence of the spoken language can be very challenging.  Japanese has a pitch accent or musical accent, which can sound like a monotone to a new speakers ear. It is quite different from the stress accent found in English, other European languages and some Asian languages. This different accent system is also why Japanese speakers often struggle with putting the accent on the correct syllables when learning English.   A stress accent pronounces the syllable louder and holds it longer. English speakers speed up between accented syllables without really thinking about it, as a habit. But the pitch accent is based on the two relative pitch levels of high and low. Each syllable is pronounced with equal length, and each word has its own determined pitch and only one accent summit. Japanese sentences are constructed so that when spoken, the words sound almost like a melody, ​with rising and falling pitches. Unlike Englishs uneven, often halting rhythm, when spoken correctly Japanese sounds like a steadily flowing stream, particularly to the trained ear. The origin of the Japanese language has been a mystery to linguists for some time. Although it bears some similarities to Chinese, borrowing some Chinese characters in its written form, many linguists consider Japanese and so-called Japonic languages (most of which are considered dialects) to be a language isolate. Regional Japanese Dialects Japan has many regional dialects (hogen), and the  different dialects all have different accents. In Chinese, dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc) vary so widely that speakers of different dialects are not able to understand each other.   But in Japanese, there are usually no  communication problems among people of different dialects since everybody understands standard Japanese (hyoujungo, a dialect spoken in Tokyo). In most cases, accentuation doesnt make a difference in the meaning of the words, and the Kyoto-Osaka dialects dont differ from Tokyo dialects in their vocabularies.   The one exception is the Ryukyuan versions of Japanese, spoken in Okinawa and the Amami Islands. While most Japanese speakers consider these to be dialects of the same language, these varieties may not be easily understood by those who speak Tokyo dialects. Even among the Ryukyuan dialects, there may be difficulty understanding each other. But the official stance of the Japanese government is that the Ryukyuan languages represent dialects of standard Japanese and are not separate languages.   Pronunciation of Japanese The pronunciation of Japanese is relatively easy compared with other aspects of the language. However, it requires an understanding of Japanese sounds, pitch accent, and intonation to sound like a native speaker. It also takes time and patience, and its easy to get frustrated. The best way to learn how to speak Japanese is to listen to the spoken language and try to imitate the way native speakers say and pronounce words.  A non-native speaker who focuses too much on the spelling or writing of Japanese without taking into account the pronunciation will have difficulty learning how to sound authentic.