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If you’ve heard about Magdalene Asylums, you likely associate them with Ireland. Between 1767 and 1996, these Catholic institutions incarcerated girls who were considered somehow wayward. The young women were forced into unpaid work, denied a formal education and deprived of many basic necessities. Babies born in the asylums — referred to as “laundries” — were routinely taken from their mothers and put up for adoption without consent.
But did you know San Francisco once had its own Magdalen Asylum?
On the site where San Francisco General Hospital now stands, a group of Irish nuns called the Sisters of Mercy opened an institution that was, at the time of its founding in 1856, a refuge for sex workers. Twelve years later, the Magdalen Asylum (today it’s unclear why the ‘e’ was dropped from the original Irish spelling of Magdalene) began taking in girls and women who had more generally been deemed in some way delinquent. These included petty criminals, “vagrants,” girls whose morals had been put into question and teens who lacked parental supervision…