Ohio History Journal

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MARIAN J

MARIAN J. MORTON

 

"Go and Sin No More": Maternity

Homes in Cleveland, 1869-1936

 

In 1869 the Woman's Christian Association of Cleveland founded

the Retreat, the first of the city's maternity homes and refuges for

women who had "lost the glory of their womanhood."1 Its founders

sought to emulate Christ's injunction to Mary Magdalen: "Woman,

sin no more; thy faith hath saved thee."2 As its name suggests, the

Retreat was a shelter, a refuge, in which the fallen woman, both vic-

tim and sinner, could be saved and reclaimed through evangelical re-

ligion, the ministrations of pious women, and the learning of domestic

skills and virtues. In 1936 the Retreat closed, victim of the hard times

of the Depression, the rising costs of medical care, and lessened de-

mand for the kind of services it provided.

In the intervening years, five more facilities for unwed mothers,

similar to the Retreat in their initial goals and strategies, opened in

Cleveland: St. Ann's Maternity Home and Infant Asylum in 1873; the

Salvation Army Rescue Home in 1892; the Maternity Home in 1892;

the Florence Crittenton Home in 1912, and another Salvation Army

facility, the Mary B. Talbert Home, in 1925. All these institutions un-

derwent significant changes in the years 1869 to 1936. All joined the

Cleveland Federation for Charity and Philanthropy, becoming part

of a network of secular social welfare agencies and conforming to the

standards imposed by the Federation and by Ohio laws regulating

maternity homes and hospitals. Fees and admission policies were

standardized; their staffs became more professional. All officially

adopted the current explanations for unwed motherhood which at-

 

 

 

Marian J. Morton is Professor of History at John Carroll University. This article was

written, in part, with aid from a National Endowment for the Humanities summer

stipend.

 

 

1. Woman's Christian Association, Annual Report 1870, 15, MS 3516, Western Re-

serve Historical Society. Hereinafter this collection will be referred to as YWCA Cleve-

land, since the collection is titled after the group's later name.

2. Mary Ingham, Women of Cleveland and Their Work: Philanthropic, Educational,

Literary, Medical and Artistic (Cleveland, 1893), 151.