A SHORT HISTORY
In 1917, influenced in part by high infant mortality rates in the city, a group of Anglican sisters established St. Monica’s Home at 182 Bree Street, Cape Town. The institution was one of the first maternity home’s in the country to accommodate all women, christian or not, married or unmarried, black or white.
St Monica’s staff regularly attended to out-patients free of charge, working to prevent toxaemia and other child-birth related diseases in some of Cape Town’s poorest areas, including District Six and Woodstock.
St. Monica’s also set up South Africa’s first training school for coloured midwives. With skilled midwives doing as much as they could to provide expectant mothers with physical and emotional support, maternal deaths were few amongst their patients despite appalling housing conditions.
For its time, St. Monica’s was extremely progressive but the reasons for this were complicated. Keep scrolling to find out more about this unique institution and the women that it served.
St Monica's in Practice
St. Monica’s was willing to enter poor communities and to work with expectant mothers on their own terms, but this was not always easily achieved. Click to find out more about the home’s everyday management.
Location and Context
In the first half of the 20th century Cape Town was a city divided by skin colour, class, religion and language. Working actively to prevent cross-religious marriages and the adoption of children into Muslim households, St. Monica’s worked to challenge some but not all of these divisions.
Anecdotes & Stories
The staff at St. Monica’s often witnessed extreme squalor and desperation, but that did not stop them from seeing their patients as people and from celebrating the extraordinary.
Case Files
Case files provide a detailed picture of the women entering the home and being attended to by its staff. They also hint at some the challenges which these women faced in raising happy and healthy children.
Add your story
Do you know someone who worked at or was assisted by St. Monica’s Home? Help us add to this retrospective by contributing your story and adding further information to this site.
