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The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison Promiscuous Women (2018)

di Scott W. Stern

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In 1918, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, Nina McCall was told to report to the local health officer to be examined for sexually transmitted infections. Confused and humiliated, Nina did as she was told, and the health officer performed a hasty (and invasive) examination and quickly diagnosed her with gonorrhea. Though Nina insisted she could not possibly have an STI, she was coerced into committing herself to the Bay City Detention Hospital, a facility where she would spend almost three miserable months subjected to hard labor, exploitation, and painful injections of mercury. Nina McCall was one of many women unfairly imprisoned by the United States government throughout the twentieth century. Tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of women and girls were locked up--usually without due process--simply because officials suspected these women were prostitutes, carrying STIs, or just "promiscuous." This discriminatory program, dubbed the "American Plan," lasted from the 1910s into the 1950s, implicating a number of luminaries, including Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Earl Warren, and even Eliot Ness, while laying the foundation for the modern system of women's prisons. In some places, vestiges of the Plan lingered into the 1960s and 1970s, and the laws that undergirded it remain on the books to this day. Scott Stern tells the story of this almost forgotten program through the life of Nina McCall.… (altro)
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Questa recensione è stata scritta per Recensori in anteprima di LibraryThing.
I've been trying, off and on, to read this book for three years and have yet to get past page 29. I teach exactly this sort of stuff, so I'm interested in the topic and have loved other books on similar topics (Judith Walkowitz's work, for instance, is excellent). But it feels like Stern can't decide on his genre here. Is he writing a serious history? Copious notes would suggest so, but the lack of a bibliography makes me question that. Is he writing a melodrama? Women faint & are in tears throughout these first pages. Josephine Butler, a tireless worker for women's rights, is described as having "dark, silky hair, high cheekbones, slightly dreamy eyes, and spine of pure steel" (10). I've read a lot of books about Josephine Butler and never once seen a reference to her dreamy eyes. Maybe he's writing a gritty, somewhat comic, noir narrative? Cops are "boors in blue" (29) and even people mentioned in only one paragraph get adjectives, like William F. Snow, whose government position remains a mystery even as we're told he's "a short, portly academic" (27).

As other reviewers have noted, Stern goes off on tangents. He connects them to the subject, though, so, at least in the first 29 pages, I didn't mind that too much. I can see how the book might become too diffuse as the chapters went on, though, and, as others have said, Nina McCall's story doesn't merit the title of the book.

I wanted to like this. I want to read this -- or, more accurately, I want to read about this horrifying topic by someone else. It's an important subject. I wish another author had written about it first.
  susanbooks | Jul 28, 2021 |
Starting in earnest around WWI, and lasting in some places through the 1970s, state and local governments—initially at the behest of the feds—followed the “American Plan” for controlling venereal disease. Rather than regulating prostitution (the French plan), the idea was to force people—which actually meant women—suspected of carrying STDs into examination and treatment, although this started before there were good ways of diagnosing or treating the main STDs. And prostitutes were to be presumed to carry STDs, though their clients were not; unsurprisingly, enforcement also disproportionately targeted African-Americans. Stern interweaves the broader narrative with the story of one young white woman, Nina McCall, who was grabbed off the street in Michigan and coerced into “treatment,” and who ultimately sued. Though she was unsuccessful, her case generated records that give insight into how these programs worked to terrorize and stigmatize women. One of Stern’s most cautionary points is that not only did these programs last a long time, they also generated legal precedents upholding them that have never been overturned. ( )
1 vota rivkat | Nov 11, 2019 |
Questa recensione è stata scritta per Recensori in anteprima di LibraryThing.
Let me start with full disclosure: I attended a state university where I graduated with English Honors and earned an "Excellent" rather than the usual "Satisfactory" on the Upper-Division Writing-Proficiency Examination (UDWPE) also known as the exit writing exam. I also attended the same state university for my Master's level academic work in Women's Studies.Additional disclosures: I was reading this book when the ethics hearings on confirmation of now Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh where in full swing so I have some kinda feelings about ivy league education. There's a lot to be infuriated about right now, if one has had a lifelong investment in politics like I have. Trump winning the electoral college votes to the presidency has made every damn day a living hell. His appointment of Kavanaugh who acted like a giant spoiled man-baby during the hearings were ridiculous. Kavanaugh's conduct was in stark contrast to the poised and well-spoken Christine Blassey-Ford who had a credible story about the ugly assault she says Kavanaugh perpetrated on her during a high school party in their young adult lives. These times are heady with trauma triggers. Also, I am finally getting around to completing this review just after the scandal of rich people buying their kids into the high standing colleges has made national headlines - mostly because two notable actresses (and not their husbands) were caught up in the FBI sting that tripped the scandal into our national consciousness. The wealthy taking the best of everything and more than their fair share is nothing new, but it does seem to be getting really out of hand.And now onto the matter at hand, The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison "Promiscuous" Women, is incredibly important. The US Government enacted local policies to test women for sexually transmitted diseases/infections. This policy was called the American Plan (in difference to the similarly enacted European Plan which was slightly less punitive) and began at a time when little was known about these illnesses or how to prevent them - it was the prevailing wisdom that women were the cause of contagion without much reference to the promiscuous men who were passing STDs/STIs. The advent of this policy began on the heals of the Typhoid Mary contagion took hold of the American Psyche so few thought much about infringing on the rights of unchaperoned young women. Nina McCall is one of the few women to successfully argue that her rights had been trampled and it is here that one wonders at how this book came to be.The legal case which Nina McCall successfully won was not a victory for anyone but herself. The final very narrow decision from the court on the matter of invading privacy and unlawful imprisonment was granted to McCall, but very specifically written so as not to be used as precedent for anyone else. The American Plan as a policy is a shocking bit of history and one that dovetails quite uncomfortably with anti-abortion legislation around the country so it is extremely important to get a handle on the the far reaching impact of its insidiousness. The American Plan is a topic that I do not begrudge our author Scott W. Stern in writing and trying to working out. To this day, there are still many policies and laws which came about because of The American Plan. These current laws hurt those trying to access sex education or birth control. These laws also hurt the HIV/AIDS community having done much harm in the early days of the crisis which took so many talented artists and members of that community. I began reading this book with the sincere hope that Stern would reveal just how horrible the efforts of the decades-long government plan to imprison "promiscuous" women really was.It was early, like in the first pages of reading this book, that I already lost it. As I read, I was constantly astounded at the long passages of nothing but weather and scenery that had damn near nothing to do with Nina McCall or The American Plan. Were these passages not insulting enough, there were pages and pages of tedious descriptions about what people wore or what they looked like or how they might be remotely tangentially related to Nina McCall that seemed to add more nonsense to the already overreaching narrative. This book was fastidiously researched for background and was likely a decent -short- master's thesis of the subject... and it should've stayed in the thesis format. The very best of the writing - and it is pretty good - is actually the epilogue where the author writes about how this book and his research on the topic came to be. This is where I really lost my mind. This guy wrote an amazing piece about himself and the rest was overwrought - overworked drivel that wastes a truly important topic. And at the same time the nation was glued to their computer and tv screens to watch the pompous man-baby ivy-leaguer, Kavanaugh get rammed into the US Supreme Court with slightly less grace than this author wrote this book. So that was truly just the icing on this shit-cake. As if it's not ugly enough, the galling connection is that there are many women who've been writing around the issues of the The American Plan including privacy and gendered (discriminatory) public policy. Stern's take is a new vantage, but in truth its not the best one and it defintiely isn't worth reading his account. And I just read recently this tidbit that Stern sold the rights for his book to to make a movie. It's fucking gross that such a pathetic effort is getting such positive attention. There are so many feminist writers who have been shouting from the rooftops about similar work with little or no fanfare. It really is just pathetic that this less than mediocre white guy gets so much success because this book is so poorly written as to be a waste of the very important topic it raises. And to bring it back home to the personal is political, my husband and I were both brilliant kids and we've got a couple of wickedly smart ones we are raising without much hope that they'll break into the elite school set no matter how hard they try. Maybe it's okay that my kiddos don't climb into the upper echelons of intellectual and social strata, but it sure is insulting to live in a time and place where false meritocracy reins.My advice: skip the book and hope the movie is better. ( )
  mamakats | May 1, 2019 |
This expansive book undertakes to investigate the array of weapons that American public health agencies deployed, in conjunction with law enforcement, to control venereal disease during the twentieth century. Thus, the author describes the enforcement campaign's origins in European practices and the anti-white slavery campaigns of the Edwardian period, the most extensive enforcement and federalization of it during the world wars, and the residual campaigns run locally after those wars. In addition, complete coverage of the subject necessitates following tangents such as prostitution (largely conflated with promiscuity by the enforcers), Prohibition, conditions in the hospitals and prisons in which the women were kept, and a mini-biography of the spottily documented life of the eponymous McCall. It's no surprise that this this is a pretty long book. In an unusually interesting epilogue, the author describes how he came to write the book, and in his even more interesting acknowledgements, he tells the story of how he got it published. It's clear that he is outraged by the campaign and that the book is a labor of love.

A long book is necessary here, but this book is too long by half for general readers. At the same time, its coverage at times seems spotty for an academic book, and he does mention that he has a second, more academic, book in hand. One wonders, for example, if there were not jurisdictions where the enforcement was less cruel and/or obsessive and why. And the passionate author makes little claim to be objective; he condemns all and sundry who were involved unless they eventually tried to end the constitutional outrages that the enforcement campaign spawned. The author writes well; he is careful to add human interest by describing his cast's physical appearance and background, the weather, and conditions in the towns he describes, though the cost here is, obviously, an even longer book. He even includes an interesting, sometimes oddball supporting cast (e.g., John D. Rockefeller, Eliot Ness). The book is well worth reading, but its considerable length (and a middle third too often spent in the tentacles of the bureaucracy or academic conferences) make it a good recreational choice mostly for those with specific interest in constitutional and women's rights, public health, or the history of prostitution. ( )
  Big_Bang_Gorilla | Jan 27, 2019 |
Fascinating history, but the conceit doesn’t work. There’s simply not enough there for Nina McCall to be considered the protagonist. And the book suffers for it. ( )
  tertullian | Jan 22, 2019 |
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To my grandparents: Deborah and Marvin Wasserman,
and the late Bernice and Cyril Stern

And also to the thousands of women
whose freedom was stolen, but who fought back
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Introduction
"Young Lady, Do You Mean
to Call Me a Liar?"

Nina McCall's decision to go to the detention hospital, the government would later claim, was entirely voluntary. She had, after all, been given a choice in the matter. And though the choice mortified her, though she did not fully understand its ramifications, though she was barely eighteen years old, and though, when she tried to take back her decision, she was told it was too late, her signature at the bottom of a three-paragraph-long voluntary commitment order was all the Michigan authorities needed to claim that she had imprisoned herself in the Bay City Detention Hospital of her own free will.
Chapter 1
"Willing to Go to Jail
for Such a Cause"

It was the autumn of 1872 in the north of England, and as the tendrils of smoke began to curl up through the rafters, Josephine Butler knew she was about to die. The windows were too high to jump out of, and Butler—along with the other women present in the hayloft—was hemmed in by enemies, with "no possible exit." The jeers of men burst through the loft. Looking down, Butler saw them, "head after head of men with countenances full of fury." Bundles of straw in the storeroom below had been set ablaze. Butler and the other women in attendance realized to their horror that they were stuck; they were trapped "like a flock of sheep surrounded by wolves," as Butler put it. Her activism, she reflected, "had stirred up the very depths of hell." She and the other women said nothing, for no one would have been able to hear them above the roar of the flames and the taunts of the men. All this, Butler thought, for trying to speak out against the laws that governed prostitution.¹
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In 1918, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, Nina McCall was told to report to the local health officer to be examined for sexually transmitted infections. Confused and humiliated, Nina did as she was told, and the health officer performed a hasty (and invasive) examination and quickly diagnosed her with gonorrhea. Though Nina insisted she could not possibly have an STI, she was coerced into committing herself to the Bay City Detention Hospital, a facility where she would spend almost three miserable months subjected to hard labor, exploitation, and painful injections of mercury. Nina McCall was one of many women unfairly imprisoned by the United States government throughout the twentieth century. Tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of women and girls were locked up--usually without due process--simply because officials suspected these women were prostitutes, carrying STIs, or just "promiscuous." This discriminatory program, dubbed the "American Plan," lasted from the 1910s into the 1950s, implicating a number of luminaries, including Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Earl Warren, and even Eliot Ness, while laying the foundation for the modern system of women's prisons. In some places, vestiges of the Plan lingered into the 1960s and 1970s, and the laws that undergirded it remain on the books to this day. Scott Stern tells the story of this almost forgotten program through the life of Nina McCall.

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