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

ISBN: 0807021857

Author: Stern, Scott W.

Condition: New

The nearly forgotten story of the fight against the American Plan, a government program designed to regulate womens bodies and sexualityA consistently surprising page-turner . . . a brilliant study of the way social anxieties have historically congealed in state control over womens bodies and behavior. -New York Times Book ReviewNina 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 womens 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.Nina McCalls story provides crucial insight into the lives of countless other women incarcerated under the American Plan. Stern demonstrates the pain and shame felt by these women and details the multitude of mortifications they endured, both during and after their internment. Yet thousands of incarcerated women rioted, fought back against their oppressors, or burned their detention facilities to the ground; they jumped out of windows or leapt from moving trains or scaled barbed-wire fences in order to escape. And, as Nina McCall did, they sued their captors. In an age of renewed activism surrounding harassment, health care, prisons, womens rights, and the power of the state, this virtually lost chapter of our history is vital reading.