Honoring the Girls Incarcerated in San Francisco’s Magdalen Asylum

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.

Their stories have now been compiled into a database by San Francisco-based author and historian Beth Winegarner, who is determined to see that both the asylum and, more importantly, the girls are not forgotten. Winegarner stumbled across the existence of the Magdalen Asylum in the course of researching her fascinating 2023 book San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries. (A graveyard had been on site for the nuns who died there.)

KQED Arts met up with Winegarner outside SF General’s Behavioral Health building — the site of the old asylum — to learn more about the database and San Francisco’s Magdalen Asylum.

What made you want to build a database about these long-forgotten asylum residents?

There’s a really great digital newspaper archive, and I kept finding articles about the teen girls who were in court and sent here. They were always very sensationalized. I decided that I was going to do clippings of all of them, and post one a day for a year. I did all of that on Twitter, and about halfway through, Elon Musk bought Twitter. So last summer, I started the process of transferring things over to my website, and then I expanded it from just the clippings to getting all the census records that I could find, and transcribing the registers — which was a pain in the butt!

Did you find yourself getting emotionally attached to some of the residents?

Yeah. There were a number who were in and out. Some of the really sassy ones from the newspapers. This one 10-year-old girl just walked into a house, took a purse, and then bought two dolls and some candy and went to see some plays. And then another girl who took a series of trains, stayed at fancy hotels and then went to Napa and rode horses.

Were there any memorably strange reasons girls ended up here?

In one case [from 1897], one girl was staying with a woman who had a Black man in her home and they like were like ‘We can’t let this happen!’ There was this word ‘incorrigible’ that got used a lot too. And I read into that, like, neurodivergence. ‘I don’t know what to do with this girl. She won’t do anything I tell her.’

Were you able to get any impressions about the nuns that were running the place?

There’s an early register kept by the nuns between, I think, 1857 and 1872. Sometimes they would just write a line, but sometimes they would write half a page about this poor unfortunate woman, blah, blah, blah. It’s hard to tell the question of the nuns’ personalities because a lot of it was coming from a very morality-based interpretation of what was going on in people’s lives.

You mentioned, in a Mission Local article about the asylum, that the Sisters of Mercy were involved in running a few other institutions in the city. Do you know anything about those?

I haven’t looked into them. I have started a little bit of research into an orphanage that was run by the Roman Catholic Church called Mount St. Joseph’s. If you were pregnant here [at the asylum] and you gave birth at the hospital, your baby would often go to that institution. The nuns would write it down: ‘Baby taken to the Mount St. Joseph’s Orphanage.’ And they had a terrible mortality rate for infants — understandably, because they were separated from their mothers.

The Irish Magdalene institutions were typically run as laundries. Was that not the case in San Francisco?

Predominantly, they were doing needlework — embroidery, stitching. There were some ads in the paper that were like, ‘If you need fine needlework done, come look us up.’ I found some online auction for an item that was produced [in the asylum], and it was this heavily embroidered cross on satin.

How did the girls get released from the asylum? 

My interpretation is that some were just let out at the age of 18. In other cases, somebody had to petition to get them out, even though they were of age. A third way was if they had a reasonably respectable man who would marry them.

I was surprised to hear that it was only nuns in the cemetery here. I assumed there would have been girls and infants too.

Some girls died here, some died in the hospital. The ones that I’ve been able to trace were predominantly buried in the Catholic cemetery, Calvary [in San Francisco’s Anza Vista neighborhood]. There was evidence that there was one Indigenous girl who died here and was buried here. I have records of who was officially buried here and who was officially dug up and reburied in Colma — and she’s not listed. But her death record says she was buried here.

What do you think happened to her?

I hope that they got her remains out when they moved everybody else. There is no record of them finding any remains when they were putting this [current behavioral health] building up.

Between around 1904 and 1932, the asylum was renamed Saint Catherine’s. Why?

It largely served the same purpose. It just changed names around about the same time it stopped being the Sisters of Mercy running it. [It got passed to] another Catholic institution, the Order of the Good Shepherd. As far as I can tell, later on, it started functioning like a nursing home for elderly women, particularly widows.

Do you know the reason behind it closing in 1932?

Mainly because the city wanted the land. I know that the [asylum] population was much smaller in the 1930 census — about 100 people.

This database has involved a massive amount of research for you. What was your main motivation behind making it?

It was clear to me when I was finding those articles that they were trying to name and shame the teen girls. Also, I’m aware that the institutions, particularly in Ireland, have done their best to hide the names of anybody who was ever incarcerated. So for me, it felt important to name them in another context. These people deserve to not be forgotten and erased.

Beth Winegarner’s database of girls incarcerated in San Francisco’s Magdalen Asylum can be found at her website.