The American Plan: The Forgotten Mass Incarceration of ‘Promiscuous’ Women in the 1920s-1950s
By: Maya Keefer
Trigger Warning: This contains non-graphic descriptions of rape, sexual coercion and forced sterilization.
STI outbreaks of Syphilis and Gonorrhea during WWI created widespread panic across the US about hygiene and STIs, which were then called venereal diseases. This panic was encouraged by the Social Hygiene movement and ASHA (The American Social Hygiene Association) which stressed cleanliness and safety and blamed prostitution and the promiscuity of young women for the STIs. This resulted in policies including the Chamberlain-Kahn Act in 1918 and the implementation of the American Plan: a mass incarceration of lower-class women, sex workers, and women of color who were suspected to have an STI.
Under the American Plan, women who were deemed suspicious by the police could be arrested, strip searched, imprisoned (potentially for years) and forced to receive treatments for their supposed STIs. “Suspicious Activity” could be almost anything: there were women detained for eating alone in a diner or walking in the street without a chaperone. Women of color and immigrant women were disproportionately targeted. Many women were detained if they refused to have sex with a police officer and women were coerced into having sex with police officers under threat of forced vaginal examination and potential arrest. In this era there was no credible way to diagnose STIs, which left it to the jurisdiction of the police to forcefully examine a woman's external anatomy and deem it clean or dirty based on no medical reasoning - an extremely degrading experience. If the woman dared to disagree or claim that she had never even had sex, she could still be detained and once imprisoned, if she continued to misbehave, she could be beaten, or even forcibly sterilized. If the woman was believed to be infected, she could be imprisoned and forced to take STI treatments - which, during this time, were repeated injections of Mercury and Arsenic, a potentially deadly combination. Mass segregated prisons for the promiscuous were rapidly built around the country, and some of those facilities were turned into Internment Camps for Japanese Americans during WWII.
In the era in which the American Plan was enforced, from around 1920 to the 1950s, between 30,000 and 100,000 American Women were detained for suspected STIs. Although the Plan mostly ceased by the 1950s, there are examples of women being forcibly searched for STIs up into the Civil Rights movement in the 60s. None of the policies that created the American Plan were ever rescinded and the Chamberlain-Kahn Act is still technically on the books. The American Plan fits within larger themes in America’s history: the demonization of Sex Workers, obsession with cleanliness being used to justify racism and degradation of women, abuse within the policing system, and the use of mass incarceration to control and threaten marginalized communities in society. The attitudes of the American Plan and the Social Hygiene movement reemerged during the HIV/AIDs epidemic and can be seen today in the continued incarceration and dehumanization of Sex Workers.