Ellen Spangler

Ellen Spangler, born 1934 and died 2021, grew up in Illinois, where she started college. She married a man who became a pharmacist. The family moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where they raised four children. She became a feminist activist in 1970, while still married to a man, and while her children were still small. She helped start a battered women’s shelter–the thirteenth in the nation–and a rape crisis center, both while attending college in Jacksonville, Florida, and while caring for her children. In the 1970s, she was a guest lecturer in various programs, speaking about violence against women and sexual abuse of children. She was also a spokesperson for the Jacksonville Women’s Movement and for Hubbard House and the Rape Crisis Center.

When Ellen came out publicly as a lesbian, she had changed her last name to Spangler (her mother’s birth name) to protect her children. She was active in the Pagoda cultural center in St. Augustine, Florida, when she lived in nearby Jacksonville during the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1980s and 1990s, she lived in South Carolina, where she operated a healing center called Starcrest. 

Ellen Spangler and her life partner, Mary Alice Stout, moved in 1999 to Alapine Village, a lesbian residential community in Alabama started by friends from the Pagoda. Ellen Spangler and Mary Alice Stout were the first to move to the land, which now has thirty-four residents. They built an earth-sheltered house called Owl Song. In a video by Jessye Ina-Lee, Ellen Spangler says, “It’s built on a slope so that there is a façade and porch area. The bulk of the house is underground, with grass and sod for a roof.” Ellen and Mary Alice were together from 1989 until Ellen’s death in August 2021. For a time, they directed Mountain Mamas, a consignment shop for women artists in nearby Cloudland, Georgia.

See also:

Jessye Ina-Lee, video interview with Ellen and Mary Alice at their Alapine home, Lesbian & Landdyke Documentary Media Project, 2005. For information contact jaehaggard@gmail.com, Women, Earth, and Spirit, PO Box 130, Serafina NM 87569, womenearthandspirit.org.

Photo Memorial to Ellen Spangler, https://www.kudoboard.com/boards/aUzjBkFe/ellen-spangler

Rose Norman, “Ellen Spangler and Starcrest,” Sinister Wisdom 124 (Spring 2020): 67-72.