In 1917, as World War I raged across the Atlantic, American government officials launched a program aimed at protecting newly-arrived army recruits from acquiring sexually-transmitted infections. It was assumed at that point that female sex workers and other “promiscuous” women were the primary carriers for STIs, and that the only way to keep America’s troops safe from the twin scourges of gonorrhea and syphilis was to limit their potential contact with these women. To this end, police and health officers gained the power to arrest and perform crude physical examinations on anyone (though the people they arrested were almost always women) they “reasonably suspected” of carrying an STI. Federal, state, and local officials were given free rein to enforce the state and national laws passed in the program’s wake, chief among which was the 1918 Chamberlain-Kahn Act.

THE TRIALS OF NINA MCCALL: SEX, SURVEILLANCE, AND THE DECADES-LONG GOVERNMENT PLAN TO IMPRISON “PROMISCUOUS” WOMEN by Scott W. Stern Beacon Press, 368 pp., $28.95

As Scott Wasserman Stern details in his new book The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison “Promiscuous” Women, if a woman was found to be sick, she was sent to a “detention hospital” (or to jail) until she was deemed cured or “reformed.” Some of those who tested negative for disease were incarcerated anyway, because their alleged promiscuity was deemed a threat to soldiers’ moral hygiene. A disproportionate number of those arrested were women of color and working class women; black women were often kept segregated from white women and jailed in subpar facilities, and, alongside other women of color, were subject to racist violence in addition to sexual assaults. Some were sterilized against their will, or without their knowledge.

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.

In 1918, 1,121 people in Michigan were “hospitalized at the expense of the state” because the authorities believed they had STIs. 49 were men; 1,072 were women, and one of them was a 19-year-old, impoverished white woman named Nina McCall. She was arrested, forcibly examined by a local health officer named Dr. Carney, deemed infected with gonorrhea and then syphilis, pumped full of arsenic, and imprisoned at the dilapidated Bay City Detention Hospital for three months. Like so many others, she found the courage to fight back. But instead of staging a prison riot or burning down the “reformatories,” as some of her incarcerated sisters did, Nina did something perhaps even more audacious for a working-class woman of her time. She took her tormentors to court.

In The Trials of Nina McCall, Stern situates Nina’s trials within the genesis of this program, tracing it from the early days of World War I through postwar progressivism, its reinvigoration at the outbreak of World War II, and throughout the civil rights era, as these laws continued to be enforced in some locales well into the 1970s. It ultimately became one of the largest-scale and longest-lasting mass quarantines in American history, though remains forgotten to an astonishing extent. It was named “the American Plan” (which is, confusingly, also the name of a plan that employers formulated in the 1930s to exploit the First Red Scare, deeming unions “anti-American.”)