Upcoming Events

Sunday March 23 at 12pm noon on Zoom

Professor Kate Moran on The San Francisco Magdalen Asylum

The ILHS is very pleased to present a talk by historian Professor Kate Moran on The San Francisco Magdalen Asylum on Sunday, March 23, 12pm noon PST by Zoom.  

On a cold December morning in 1854, five Irish Sisters of Mercy and three Irish novices
disembarked in San Francisco. Famously, within a year these women would found St.
Mary’s Hospital, the first Catholic hospital in California. In 1856, they would also found
another institution, named for a different Mary: the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum.
The San Francisco Magdalen Asylum, later called St. Catherine’s Home, was founded
to provide refuge for women fleeing sex work and for pregnant, unmarried girls in post-
Gold Rush San Francisco. Within a little over a decade, it also became a state-
supported carceral institution, locking up girls sentenced by the courts for such crimes
such as vagrancy and “improper conduct.” As a result, the asylum was the subject of at
least two lawsuits, both of which accused the city of unlawfully contracting out its public
duties to a religious institution. The asylum was closed in 1932, and today the site –
near the corner of 21 st Street and Potrero Avenue – is home to Zuckerberg San
Francisco General Hospital.

This presentation will share some of the history of the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum,
based on my research in progress, and will reflect on how a focus on similar Magdalen
Asylums (there were at least 40 around the United States in the early twentieth century)
might illuminate new directions in Irish American history.

Katherine D. Moran is Associate Professor of American Studies at Saint Louis
University. She holds a Ph.D. in United States History from Johns Hopkins University.
Her book, The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire
(Cornell University Press, 2020) examines cross-confessional commemorations of
Catholic history as part of the rhetoric of U.S. empire. Her second book project –
California Magdalens: Women, Religion, and the Carceral State, 1850-1940 – is a
globally-situated history of the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum.