Chamberlain-Kahn Act of 1918

This is a photo from 1943 of a detention hospital for infected women in Leesville, Louisiana. And I’m about to deliver a really sad story about the U.S. government’s treatment of women during the 20th century. This is about a series of laws that came to be known as “The American Plan,” and they resulted in tens of thousands of American women being arrested, detained, physically searched, and sometimes imprisoned without due process, on the alleged suspicion that they had contracted a sexually transmitted disease.

As millions of American men entered the First World War, STDs among soldiers skyrocketed, and the US Congress decided that a good way to combat the spread of venereal disease would be to quarantine any woman suspected of having a STD. The kickstarter piece of legislation was the Chamberlain-Kahn Act of 1918. It allowed any woman within five miles of a military garrison to be arrested. She would be subject to an intrusive exam that tested her for disease, and, if positive, she would be sentenced to a hospital or prison until cured, or reformed.

These laws were horrible and legal enforcement extremely abusive. A highly disproportionate percent of women arrested were poor or women of color. Some were given operations to make them sterile against their will. In effect, these laws made it possible that “any woman, at any time, could be legally arrested, sexually assaulted, and hauled off to jail with no trial, no lawyer, and no idea when she’d be released”. Many “treatments” that women in such medical prisons received for gonorrhea and syphilis at the time involved doses of mercury and arsenic.

In 1921, the US Supreme Court favored the side of a woman named Nina McCall who had been arrested, roughly examined, considered infected, and forcefed arsenic. Yet historian Scott Stern argues that instead of halting the practice, the case served to bolster the idea that law-enforcement officers still had the right to arraign a “suspicious” woman (just so long as they operated according to regulations). Stern’s research uncovered many state laws that were similar to the Chamberlain-Kahn Act, which continued to be enforced up to the early 1970s.