Lock Her Up
The decades-long U.S. government plan to imprison “promiscuous” women
There’s a dark chapter in American history that gets left out of the history books: the American Plan, which detained tens, and possibly hundreds of thousands of women from the 1910s through the 1950s. Conceived in World War I to protect soldiers from “promiscuous” women and the diseases they possibly carried, women were surveilled, picked off the street, detained without due process, imprisoned sometimes for years, and forcefully injected with unproven mercury treatments for sexually transmitted infections they were merely suspected of having. The American Plan laid the groundwork—and sometimes, the literal foundations—for the women’s prisons and mass incarcerations of today. Progressive luminaries like Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, and Earl Warren endorsed the plan, so its victims, more often than not women of color, were often forced to fight back on their own. Historian Scott W. Stern joins us to tell the story of Nina McCall, one of the women who defied a system that locked her up even though she was a virgin, experimented on her, and then tried to silence her.
Go beyond the episode:
- Scott W. Stern’s The Trials of Nina McCall, based on his master’s thesis in American Studies at Yale
- Read Stern’s opinion piece for The Washington Post on “Why hero worship is a mistake for the left”
A detention hospital for infected women in Leesville, Louisiana. (From a 1943 article in Collier’s magazine/courtesy Scott W. Stern)
A selection of anti-STI propaganda posters, some more tasteful than others, produced by the U.S. government while the American Plan was in effect:
Government poster, circa 1940 (NIH, History of Medicine)
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!
Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
