St Margaret’s Home for Unwed Mothers
St Margaret’s Home for Unwed Mothers
Bourke Street
Darlinghurst
NSW
Australia
Provider: Sisters of St Joseph
Year Opened: 1894
Year Closed: 1982
St Margaret’s Home for Unwed Mothers, Surry Hills, was attached to St Margaret’s Hospital from 1894. It was a home for unmarried mothers who were waiting to give birth, and for their babies. It was part of St Margaret’s Hospital, and was run by the Sisters of St Joseph from 1937. It closed around 1982.
CLAN Homes – Orphanages Gallery
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CLAN Museum Gallery
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CLAN library books where this Home is mentioned include:
N 196
In January 1966, Kate Howarth gave birth to a healthy baby boy at St Margaret’s Home for unwed mothers in Sydney. In the months before the birth, and the days after, she resisted intense pressure to give up her son for adoption, becoming one of the few women to ever leave the institution with her baby. She was only sixteen years old. Kate Howarth vividly recounts the first seventeen years of her life in Sydney’s’ slums and suburbs and in rural New South Wales. Abandoned by her mother as a baby and then by ‘Mamma’, her volatile grandmother, as a young girl, Kate was shunted between Aboriginal relatives and expected to grow up fast.
