“Are you wearing a mask…?”

Donaldina Cameron and Tien Fuh Wu, two of the women whose life stories I weave together in The White Devil’s Daughters, lived through the terrible flu pandemic of 1918-1919, which killed upwards of 50 million people worldwide.

 

Just as today’s Covid-19 pandemic has taken its steepest toll to date at nursing homes and other institutions, so did the so-called “Spanish Flu” sweep through the two homes for vulnerable girls and women that Cameron and Wu ran in the San Francisco Bay Area. One of the homes was on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown and the other was in Oakland.

 

Both homes were crowded, with many girls and young women sharing bathrooms and bedrooms. At 920 Sacramento Street in San Francisco, Cameron reported to her board that the flu had sickened nearly all of the home’s residents and staffers. “Not one death out of almost fifty cases,” praising the tireless nursing and care provided to the sick by her longtime colleague, Tien Fuh Wu, and others.

 

Cameron, who marked her fiftieth birthday during the pandemic, was already overworked and under a great deal of stress when the Spanish Flu hit. The city government of San Francisco had mandated that everyone wear masks. A former teacher at the home was so worried about Cameron’s health that she wrote to her that year, asking, “Are you wearing a mask and taking precautions?”

 

Since Cameron worked closely with city officials and was a well-known public figure in the Bay Area, it is likely she followed the order and wore a mask. Cameron also put herself at risk by traveling during that time, including weekly trips to the home in Oakland, where the flu had also spread among its young residents. About thirty of its fifty girls got sick, but thankfully, no one died.

 

But Cameron and Wu’s wider circle of its supporters did suffer. One of the home’s earliest champions, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, died from the flu in 1919. Sadly, Hearst had not heeded the advice of health officials: she did not wear a mask to protect herself, according to her biographer Alexandra M. Nickliss. She died on April 13, 1919, at her beloved Hacienda del Pozo de Verona, about thirty-five miles southeast of San Francisco.