Cecile Lusby 1655 words
On Not Forgetting Broderick Street
Housing advocates marked 2010 as the opening of the Zygmunt Arendt House and its forty-seven affordable senior apartments. Arendt, an immigrant investor, died in 1998 leaving San Francisco a gift of six million dollars, to be divided between the needy (60%) and children (40%). For the ‘needy’ portion of the charitable trust, planners decided to rebuild the red brick structure at 850 Broderick Street. This construction went forward with no mention of the nationwide social agency once located at that address or the troubled young women who came from all over the country to stay there over the course of fifty years.
The Arendt project involved demolishing the old structure to make a new complex with forty-seven small apartments for formerly homeless seniors. The old place held a certain fascination for those of us who once lived there. We were the Crittenton girls. After the publication of Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away in 2006, my curiosity was renewed and I returned to look around and take photographs. It was sad to see the building vacant and neglected. Then I saw the sign announcing the ‘future home of the Zygmunt Arendt House’.
850 Broderick was the address of the Florence Crittenton Home. The brick dwelling on the corner of Golden Gate and Broderick housed unmarried pregnant women. No girl could enter until she was seven months along. In the months before entering, the girls lived at home, lingering inside for months. Once their pregnancy showed, most girls left town. It was a relief to move to Crittenton’s and stop hiding.
Society has changed: we no longer ‘disappear’ our pregnant teens. Urban Renewal has changed the face of the city, demolishing homes and apartments in both the Western Addition and in the Fillmore. This neighborhood was once a depressed area, but is upscale again in today’s multicultural market. What difference would one more missing landmark make in the creation of the Arendt House? Why would anyone care about the history of that address now?
After admission to the Home, we had a choice—to stay indoors and wait passively or go out and look around. Those of us who were fit enough for exercise soon discovered on our walks that there were very few white people nearby. Thus Crittenton’s kept the secret of its white, middle class clients. Another rule was that we never used our last names; the director advised against forming close friendships, because in a couple of months we would move on, away from this secret. In the protocol of the late 1950s and 1960s, we all were supposed to give up our babies and leave the Home a few weeks after giving birth.
Moffitt Hospital gave us obstetrical care and San Francisco Social Services assisted in foster care placement prior to each adoption. As soon as a Crittenton infant was born, nurses carried it out of the delivery room down the hall to a designated crib in the nursery for a couple of days until social workers drove that child to a foster mother where adoptive parents came to collect their new baby. This practice persisted from 1949 until the 1970s, when society allowed girls to keep their babies. From that time on there was little need for seclusion or secrecy, and in time fewer women used the facility.
History shows a number of changes in the way society has treated unwed mothers. In the 19th century US orphanages housed babies without fathers, and then foundling homes cared for both illegitimate children and influenza orphans after the pandemic of 1918-1919. A single mother was expected to turn over the baby and go her own way. Settlement Houses changed that practice in American cities of the early 20th century, sending unmarried mothers back to school to train as nurses or teachers while female staff workers provided child care for one or two years.
By the Great Depression, the economic downturn ended tolerant attitudes and a changed society discouraged promiscuity and pregnancy out of wedlock. The post WWII era extended social condemnation of unwed mothers by viewing them as the ones primarily responsible for their fatherless babies and accordingly, their own plight. The maternity homes of the post WWII did not rehabilitate: they housed girls in a boarding house fashion until they delivered and then provided adoption services for their infants.
The loosening of social norms in the late 1960s and the practice of private ‘open adoptions’ meant that maternity homes had to re-organize; 850 Broderick assumed the name, Florence Crittenton Services. Their new mission was to work for the needs of young women who chose to keep their babies. Over the next decade each mother shared a room with her infant. By the late 1980s the critical population Crittenton focused on was ‘at-risk’ mothers with drug histories, violent boyfriends, or more than one child.
After getting my credential, I did some on-call counseling at the Crittenton Home in the 1990s, and found the changes after thirty years mind-boggling. There were new rules about not opening the front door without looking through the peephole to be sure it was client, and not a thug. Family arguments in the visiting room made the environment so dangerous that on occasions the police had to be called. Crittenton’s staff had a hard time controlling drug traffic on the premises. Residents screamed demands and epithets at the staff. The Home was having a hard time dealing with the overwhelming issues clouding the lives of the residents. I stopped going there when I got a better job.
Then silence. Did the problems disappear? Did they escalate and implode? Where maternity homes once kept girls secluded to prevent their being recognized, a couple of decades later single moms could live with their babies in a changed culture.
How could such dramatic changes in women’s lives go unrecorded? In my research-by-walking-around mode, I could find no one on or near the premises, no way to do any fact checking. I began to search through library records and microfilm to track the changes of the last half-century. The results of my efforts were disappointing.
After three hours with the San Francisco Historical Society, I walked away empty handed. I had a few pages of a Florence Crittenton pamphlet and nothing about the city’s other maternity home, nearby St. Elizabeth’s Infant Hospital on Masonic. No articles on San Francisco’s unwed mothers’ homes now exist after decades of society requiring that girls and women be confined there.
I also used Santa Rosa Library’s microfilm reader to go through the index of the San Francisco Chronicle from 1904 to 1959 and 1950-1980. I found results only in the late 1940s announcing fund raising efforts and then construction in 1949. There was one article in 1951 on the election of officers for the Ladies Auxiliary. Otherwise nothing remains in that index. There are no articles under ‘Unwed Mothers’ or ‘Unwed Mothers’ Homes’, nothing under ‘Maternity Homes.’
The lack of information is understandable: unwed mothers’ homes offered confidentiality; at a time in our history when unmarried pregnancy meant disgrace, secrecy was required. There were no newspaper articles that might compromise a resident’s identity. A virtual blackout of information on the social practices involving the birth mothers persists from 1949 to 2000.
Unmarried pregnant women are simply expectant parents now. The shift was gradual, but it did happen. Should this aspect of San Francisco’s history go unwritten? A system of special and separate treatment persisted for at least forty years at this San Francisco site alone, involving most American institutions: Medicine, Education, Social Services, the Law, and the Family. Until the passage of Title 9 in 1973, pregnant girls were expelled from high school when their condition became obvious. There were no consequences for the boys. There were no DNA tests to prove paternity and determine financial responsibility, no birth control was prescribed without a doctor seeing a wedding ring, (no birth control at all could be sold in several states on the East Coast), no reproductive choice, no legal abortions until Roe v. Wade in 1973, no ‘morning after pill’ for a sixteen-year-old after a date rape.
Was it all a dream?
When the brick façade came down at 850 Broderick, there was new housing for San Francisco’s low-income seniors at the Arendt House, and that surely is something to celebrate. But where is the whole history of the place? What will mark the passing of a social institution intended to separate and confine women then seen as out of bounds and out of control?
My stay was more than fiftyyears ago, and though I later married and had children I could keep, I never stopped wondering what happened to my first baby. With a lot of work I found him - after a forty-three year search. The last generation of women that society expected to give up their babies delivered them in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. By 2012, those women are 40 years older, somewhere between 55 and 70 years old at this writing; the women from the 1940s and 1950s are aged or dead by now. Ann Fessler calculated a figure of one and a half million American women who surrendered babies in the years between 1945 and 1973. I write to remember them, to grieve for their exile and estrangement, and to bear witness.
I send my best, bright hopes to the senior citizens who find affordable rentals at the corner of Golden Gate and Broderick. I hope they enjoy their new facility and can walk around the neighborhood as we once did. But I will remember that address all my life. I will remember my sisters, outsiders of fifty years ago and feel at my back the ghosts of the girls we were.
The Zygmunt Arendt House
Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers at 850 Brodrick Street
Operated from 1949 – 2007 in San Francisco
The last days of the old Crittenton Home.
