American Misogyny: The Forgotten “American Plan” to Imprison “Immoral” Women

% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

One of the peculiarities of the US Constitution is that when written, the founding fathers seemed more concerned with the procedures government agencies can use when enforcing laws than in the content of the laws themselves. 

 

Consequently, unless free speech or the “right to bear arms” are infringed upon, governments can write any damned fool law they want, no matter how unfair and discriminatory it might be. 

 

 

For example, civil forfeiture laws are in place that allow confiscation of private property based only on a suspicion that it is associated with criminal activity. 

 

No proof is needed, and the individuals involved are presumed guilty until they manage to sue the government and prove their innocence. 

 

Disturbing laws are produced and generate enough public outrage that they are no longer enforced. 

 

But they are often neither repealed nor ruled unconstitutional, living on waiting for circumstances to change again to where some political wing will wish to reimplement them.

Scott W. Stern was a Yale student who stumbled upon a forgotten period in US history when “social hygiene” laws were used predominately to incarcerate women who were deemed a threat to society.  Stern recorded what he learned in his book The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison “Promiscuous” Women.

 

Several reviews of Stern’s work are available to describe what he discovered.  Heather Ann Thompson produced An Enduring Shame for the New York Review of Books, and Kim Kelly provided A Forgotten War on Women for The New Republic.

 

The story begins when the US thrust itself into the war in Europe in 1917.  It had to quickly provide a large number of troops for a type of war with which it was unfamiliar.  Social scientists stepped in to provide assistance. 

 

One gave intelligence tests to the soldiers in hopes of filtering out men who were so dumb as to be a threat to their units.  What the tests indicated was that the average intelligence of an army recruit was just barely above that of a moron.  Needless to say, the army did not send the majority of troops back home and managed to participate in the war successfully. 

 

However, there was another concern raised that was more concrete and more observable.  It was known that sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) or as they were known then, STIs (sexually transmitted infections) were common among troops in Europe.  With more than a million men on the move to various training camps and being shipped overseas, it was thought important that this force not be incapacitated by STIs.

 

  Normally, one imagines females being hidden in cellars or closets for protection when the military comes to town, but this concern turned that logic on its head and decided that it was the army’s healthy men that needed protection from promiscuous women.

 

Thompson provides this perspective.

 

“At the turn of the century, when antibiotics had yet to be discovered, syphilis and gonorrhea were rampant in American cities. Notably, concern among reformers and government officials over venereal diseases (as sexually transmitted infections—STIs—were called at the time) was fueled by a more general rise in white anxiety over changing ethnic and racial demographics across the nation: 14.5 million people immigrated to the US between 1900 and 1920, and half a million African-Americans moved to northern cities from the South during World War I.”

 

“Governmental and reformer concern with venereal diseases escalated dramatically upon America’s entry into World War I, when the sexual health of soldiers became a military priority. Many thousands were infected as they socialized in cities where they were stationed before heading to the front, which resulted in the dismissal of over 10,000 men and countless lost hours of work. Recasting venereal disease as a national security issue led to the creation in the late 1910s of several laws that came to be known as the American Plan.”

 

This “American Plan” is not to be confused with strategies employers used in the 1920s to foil unionization, an activity it deemed to be “un-American.”

 

“What began as a local effort to reduce prostitution around military bases quickly expanded. Federal agents divided the nation into ten districts within which paid supervisors and field representatives were “to investigate the presence of alcohol, prostitution, and general female promiscuity in a given area.” Should investigators discover women they considered likely to have an STI, they had the legal authority to examine them, quarantine them indefinitely, and subject them to medical treatments that were thought to be a “magic bullet” but were known to be extremely painful and carry terrible side effects. At the time, Stern writes, ‘no effective treatment existed for syphilis or gonorrhea.’ This practice ‘went on for decades’—well after the supposed need to protect soldiers in both World War I and World War II passed—and incredibly, ‘the age listed for a first “offense” or “delinquency” was often as low as seven’.”

 

Stern, while still a student at Yale, uncovered this old notice apparently provided to women who had been arrested in San Francisco.

 This activity lost its federal funding in 1922, but the enthusiasm for it generated funding from other agencies.  Programs were active in almost all states and went on long after both world wars had passed.  It became clear that the motivation was more to control the lives of women—particularly poor and colored women— than to protect society.

“This decades-long initiative to ‘reform’ poor women in the name of protecting the public was made possible by the strong support of well-respected female reformers like Jessie Binford, by the substantial funding of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and other well-known philanthropists, by the aggressive enforcement of J. Edgar Hoover, and by the deep conviction of jurists such as Earl Warren that the American Plan was necessary for national security.”

 

“Stern is entirely right to concentrate on the underappreciated damage that the plan did to poor women across the country. The program, he shows, was never really about venereal disease—it was an effort to clean up the streets and police the behavior of women. He recounts how local law enforcement used the American Plan to ‘commit girls between the ages of ten and seventeen’ for ‘frequent[ing] saloons,’ or ‘lounging upon the public streets,’ or ‘attend[ing] any public dance, skating rink or show’ without a parent’s permission, but never boys.”

 

We must turn to Kim Kelly’s account for appropriately outraged comments.

 

“Sex workers were the prime targets, but so was any woman deemed ‘suspicious’—which at that time could mean anything from being seen in the company of a soldier to eating alone in a restaurant. As the program became more firmly rooted within the legal system, with undercover agents from ASHA (American Social Hygiene Association) acting as its enforcers, a stark reality became apparent: Any woman, at any time, could legally be arrested, sexually assaulted, and hauled off to jail with no trial, no lawyer, and no idea when she’d be released.

 

Those who were imprisoned in detention hospitals were subjected to involuntary medical examinations, inhumane living conditions, and treatments for gonorrhea and syphilis. Unfortunately, at that point, the most common ‘cure’ for these diseases was a strict regimen of continuous doses of mercury and arsenic, toxic chemicals which poisoned these women’s bodies while doing absolutely nothing to cure their ills.”

 

“The ideas at the heart of the program have, however, proved remarkably resilient. Its tendrils of influence crept into the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Japanese internment camps, and the responses to the AIDS epidemic, and helped to lay the groundwork for the current mass incarceration crisis. As Stern has uncovered, the same Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps that were later used to imprison Americans of Japanese and German descent, prisoners of war, and conscientious objectors during World War II originally functioned as ‘concentration camps’ for women incarcerated under the American Plan.” 

 

Stern used the details of Nina McCall’s life to describe what these laws could do to an individual woman.  When Nina was eighteen years old she was spotted by a woman, Ida Peck, who was hired to seek out “suspicious” women.  She lived in a small town in Michigan that was hardly a den of iniquity, but it had a railroad station on a line that transported servicemen off to war.  These men had to be protected from eighteen-year-old girls.  Nina was directed to show up at a doctor’s office, that of Dr. Carney, for an exam, even though she claimed she couldn’t possibly have a sexually transmitted disease.

 

“Within hours she had been given a rough and painful gynecological exam, diagnosed with gonorrhea, and informed that she now had two choices: she could either have a placard affixed to the door of her home warning the public that she was diseased and quarantined, or she could check into a local hospital where she would have to stay until she was fully cured. Despite her fervent insistence that it simply wasn’t possible for her to be infected, Nina chose detention over the prospect of bringing shame on her mother’s house.”

 

While in detention she was additionally diagnosed as have syphilis as well.  The injections she received caused intense pain, caused her hair and teeth to begin to fall out, and risked her life.  According to Stern:

 

“….[they] caused, among other things, throbbing pain, kidney damage, inflammation or ulceration of the mouth, and terrible skin rashes….It could [also] stunt growth, affect the memory and basic mental functioning, bring about deafness or blindness, and result in death.”

 

After three months she was finally released, a marked woman in the small town.  Yet she continued to be harassed by the authorities.

 

“She was required, according to Peck, to continue to undergo treatment (the dreaded mercury injections) even though she had been released. According to Carney, they hadn’t been giving her the right kind of mercury, and she needed a new regimen. Should she refuse to comply, Nina was told, she would be locked up again.”

 

Once she began to recover from a series of injections she would be called back for another series.  After a year of this abuse she sued Peck and Carney.  She lost her case initially, but then won it on appeal.  It was a victory for her, but a pyrrhic victory for women in general. 

 

Kelly provides this perspective.

 

“Nina McCall’s wasn’t a particularly special case, and even her fight for justice wasn’t altogether unheard of. Nina stood out to Stern, both because of her sheer audacity and because the Michigan state archives happened to have kept detailed records of her case. In 1921, she took her case against those who had wronged her all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court and won.

 

The court decided that Carney had erred in his treatment of her, because he had no reasonable grounds for suspicion that she had been infected; but that if he had, his actions would have been perfectly acceptable. Her victory proved bittersweet: The ruling—known as Rock v. Carney—went on to provide the justification for decades more abuses. The ASHA [American Social Hygiene Association] used it to bolster the right ‘of the health officer to quarantine persons suffering with the venereal disease in an infectious state who constitute a menace to the public health’.”

 

Thompson describes the American Plan programs as a “method of maintaining the racial and economic status quo in the face of demographic and political disruption.”  She agrees with Stern that the attempt to maintain this status quo still informs public policy today although the laws used to justify it have changed over time.

 

“When we see the American Plan not in isolation, but rather as a part of a long history—from slavery in the 1800s to mass incarceration in the 2000s—Stern’s book is not merely the story of one women’s fight against injustice. His research exposes both the insidious ways in which calls for ‘public safety’ soon come to justify the curtailment of rights, and the extent to which today’s most destructive carceral apparatus has its basis in fear on the part of the powerful. Race, class, and gender profiling inform which citizens today are policed and imprisoned. The same factors determined who was surveilled and locked away under the American Plan.”

 

Let us finish with Kelly’s perspective on what this history means.

 

“None of the three federal laws passed in 1917, 1918, and 1919 have ever been struck down in appeals court or repealed; they remain on the books in various forms today, and the toxic attitudes they enabled continue to impact women in America today….When public officials detained a number of HIV-positive individuals in the 1980s and 1990s (many of them sex workers), the ghost of the American Plan reared its head once more; one court decision from 1990 directly cited a 1919 case that declared the quarantine of a woman infected with gonorrhea a ‘reasonable and proper’ action. Everything old is new again.”

 

“The truths revealed in this book are truly shocking, and even more so because they are so little known. The culture of silence that has impacted sex workers for so long has finally begun to dissipate, but potent dangers remain. More than 200,000 women are currently incarcerated, and represent the fastest-growing segment of the prison population; up to 70 percent of women behind bars are or have been involved in the commercial sex industry. Women are still arrested on false pretenses, simply for how they look or present, or for carrying condoms in their purses; sex workers—particularly those who are trans women of color—are extremely vulnerable to police brutality and criminal justice abuses. Women like Nina McCall….fought against a system that saw them as less than human. One hopes the fact that more authors are now working to tell those stories means that more people will fight back.”

The interested reader might find the following articles informative: