Scott W. SternBesprekingen

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fascinating and horrifying...I had never heard of the American Plan before reading this book, but it was strangely familiar--we're still fighting for bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and racial justice today. This book is very detailed and meticulously documented, and well worth a read. I will be thinking about this book for a long time to come and recommending it to everyone I know to be interested in justice issues and United States history.

The subject matter was very interesting, very important. I even learned something new about my hometown. But the writing was only so-so. The author obviously put a lot of work into researching this book, but it felt bogged down by superfluous details. Perhaps the editor didn't do their job. It took me a long time to get through this one.

The events Stern chronicles took place almost exactly a century ago yet they seem eerily familiar. The Chamberlain-Kahn Act of 1918 instituted the American Plan as a national security measure to protect World War I soldiers from venereal disease. Under the plan, young women “reasonably suspected” of prostitution or promiscuity could be detained, questioned, physically examined and coerced into detention hospitals where they were forced to undergo treatments that were both toxic and ineffective, all without due process. Just a hint of suspicion was all that was needed to bring a woman to the attention of the authorities.

Nina McCall was a naive, poorly educated eighteen year old girl when deputy sheriff Martin approached her and insisted that she had to be examined by Dr. Carney. After a painful, invasive exam the doctor stated that she was mildly diseased with gonorrhea even though she said she had never been with any man. The sheriff and the doctor insisted she must go to the Bay City Detention Hospital where she would be treated. Feeling intimidated by the men and threatened with having a quarantine sign placed on her home if she refused, McCall reluctantly agreed to the treatment.

There were detention hospitals across the country; most were overcrowded, unsanitary, poorly equipped and many were run like prisons with cruel staff, armed guards and barbed wire fencing. While at Bay City, McCall was also given a Wassermann test, not that the results mattered much. According to doctors, even a slightly positive test strongly indicated syphilis but a negative result did not exclude the disease, thus the women were condemned either way. McCall was given mercury injections for syphilis as well as arsenic injections for gonorrhea. Inmate records are sparse or totally lost so there is no way to know how many young women died from this protocol. Some women rioted or set fires; others tried to escape. If caught they were severely punished or sent to jail. A few lost their life in the attempt to break out. A number of women (even one nine year old girl) were also forced to undergo sterilization surgery.

Although World War I ended, the war against sexually transmitted diseases did not. Occasionally officials would admit that it was really a war against prostitution. Federal funds began to dry up but states were free to continue their own efforts. As the government began to prepare for war again in the late 1930s, the American Plan was revived with support from the public and especially from those who had overseen the earlier program. Eliot Ness (yes, that Eliot Ness) became head of the Social Protection Division and traveled about the country urging police to round up women. Earl Warren, the California attorney general who would later become Chief Justice, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Plan’s goals and methods. FBI agents partnered with local police officers to hunt down suspected women. Some cities continued to enforce Plan laws into the 1970s.

It is not really surprising to learn that the way the Plan was administrated was racist, misogynist and anti-immigrant. Men were rarely detained or forced into treatment facilities while black women were overly represented. In 1935, Gallup, New Mexico arrested, examined and imprisoned Native American women but not white women. The creators of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study had previously had roles in the American Plan. Informed consent was neither necessary nor important.

This book is deeply disturbing and anger-inducing. It is fully indexed and includes a great deal of historic detail, all meticulously documented in the sixty-four pages of notes. Almost every detail, including the weather, is documented. Some paragraphs have a citation for each sentence. Any speculation is clearly identified as such. Nevertheless, Nina McCall herself remains a shadowy background figure but perhaps that is appropriate because she is Everywoman. She is every woman who has ever been held responsible for all the ills of the world ever since Eve, every woman who has been denied control of her own body, every woman who has been denied justice, every woman who has been silenced or whose history has been erased or hidden.

One more thing to consider. Over the years various American Plan laws were passed by cities and states across the country. Those laws were never repealed; they remain on the books to this day.

Well written and researched but clearly a niche market book that will not appeal to all. An interesting unfamiliar topic that needs to be brought out in the open.

I had never heard of this program before finding this book in LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Unfortunately, I cannot say that I’m surprised our government and society did these terrible things without justification. It is just another chapter in the much too long book of oppression. I rated the book only three stars because I do not like the style of history writing. Stern often imagines what people may have thought or seen or done or said or etc. Humanizing Nina McCall is important for this book. However, even though Stern acknowledges what is speculation, we already have too many playing loose with the facts, and we shouldn’t make them up in order to fill in gaps. In today’s environment it is even more important that we decry injustice by illuminating the truth.

The fifth star is also for the new and frightening information about our government's love for heinous treatment of the citizens who are supposed to be the power behind the government. Stern uses the life of Nina McCall as representative of the long and despicable plan by the government to enforce morality, as defined by itself, on it's citizens. The cruelty, torture, degradation, and ruined lives brought about by this program over the last century, or so, is unimaginable except for Stern's chronicle of exactly what happened, to Ms. McCall and thousands like her, in the name protecting public health and morality. I can not begin to list the atrocities committed by the holier-than-thou protectors of the public good. It was a program misguided from the beginning by righteousness, racism, and misogyny; yes the laws were implemented to control women, men were over-looked in the enforcement of "the American Plan". Learn this History!

I find it truly disappointing that someone could take such a potentially interesting topic and generate such a boring book. The author goes into excruciating detail about information that is not of interest to anyone but an expert on this history. This is well researched but poorly written. I cannot recommend this book to anyone but perhaps a historian.½

Every person should read this book. It should not be considered a book just for women's studies or a book just for legal studies. THE TRIALS OF NINA McCALL is an important work on a neglected, ignored, and largely unknown part of American history, a history that is not taught in schools or even recalled by many of the elders living who remember the World Wars or the years in between. It is an eye opening study of the American Plan, something that most Americans have never heard of. The American Plan, started in the 1910s, was at its most active peak during WWI and WWII, but lasted in some form, in some states, right up until the 1970s. The frightening part is that the American Plan could happen again if we let it. That is why reading and understanding THE TRIALS OF NINA McCALL is so important.

What was the American Plan? It allowed local officials, generally from a department of Public Health, but often police officers, to take in any woman they suspected of prostitution or suspected of being "promiscuous," observed hanging out with men and/or with soldiers, or really any woman at all and force her to submit to a test for venereal diseases. This program was started when tests for venereal diseases were not even very accurate! The women were often told they tested positive (whether they were or not is certainly up for question) and then sent to a detainment center for "treatment." One horrifying act followed another. It was bad enough that the women were arbitrarily stopped on the street, perhaps on the way to buy groceries or on the way to a legitimate job, but to be forced to have a test for a venereal disease against their will should certainly have been deemed illegal. Following that, to be told - often untruthfully or unproven - that she had a sexually transmitted disease would have sent most women into severe anxiety or depression. Feeling powerless, not knowing the truth, and having someone (usually a man, but often another woman) threatening them with jail if they didn't oblige, most went off - not happily, but without a huge protest - to the "treatment center" that turned out to be more of an internment camp or jail. Once there, the women were forced to work in the kitchen, the laundry, or cleaning in other parts of the facility. Besides work, they were kept mostly inside, guarded closely, and made to endure what were often very painful treatments. The ultimate horror was that the women were being treated by so-called medical therapies that were not proven to work and, in some cases, may have done actual physical harm to the women.

Who was Nina McCall? Nina was chosen by the author as the vehicle by which his book on the American Plan progressed. Her story told THE story of what was happening in the country during that time period. Nina, like many of the young women, was basically plucked off the street one day. She was not a prostitute, she was not known locally as a promiscuous woman. She was a teenaged girl who was just starting to live her life, and it was not clear why she was chosen to be tested and incarcerated for "treatment." There was a story of someone seeing her in a car with a young man or young men. Imagine that happening in today's world! A mere car ride labels a woman as promiscuous and ends her in a jail-like treatment center for three months! The sad and frightening part of Nina's story is that there was no way of knowing whether her test was positive or negative as - even though she was told it was positive - it has been pointed out how unreliable tests were at that period in time (1918).

Nina was in custody for three months during which time she was forced to have various treatments for gonorrhea and syphilis; neither treatment had ever been proven effective. It might not have been so bad if she had been treated kindly while in the treatment program, but, as has already been explained, it was more like a jailhouse atmosphere rather than a medical facility. There was no compassion. Also, all the residents were women. Odd? Didn't men get sexually transmitted diseases? Evidently, at that time, it was thought that women gave the diseases to men (it couldn't possibly be the other way around . . .?), and men, it seems, were mostly treated outside of such facilities whereas women were imprisoned in them.

The book follows Nina from when she was taken in for testing through to the end of her life. The in-between times covered her attempts at trying to make a normal life for herself after having been labeled in a way that would be very hard to shake. Later on in life, Nina sued those who imprisoned her, and, in a courtroom debacle, in a strong showing of misogyny, and in a world where obviously men had the final say, Nina lost a case that in today's world we would like to think she would have won.

THE TRAILS OF NINA McCALL takes place mostly in Michigan as that was where Nina lived, but the American Plan was in effect all over. The author - Scott W. Stern - chose to highlight Nina as he had access to the transcripts from the trial and therefore there was more information available on Nina than on any of the other young, faceless women who suffered similar fates. Stern is a very detailed writer who obviously enjoys research, but whose passion for justice shines through in his writing. It is interesting to note that he became interested in the American Plan when he first heard about it as a freshman in college. He decided then that he would make that his focus - to learn more about the American Plan and to educate Americans about this covered-up part of their history. It is quite commendable that someone that young would discover his life calling at such an early age and would stick to his plan, eventually publishing an extremely well-thought-out and well-written book. Stern is an expert at opening the eyes of his readers.

Whenever we think about government intrusion in our lives, we don't really relate it to our sexuality or our sex lives. But the American Plan could easily return. The kind of thinking that started it to begin with is still around in the minds of some people. Women are still treated as second-class citizens in ways too many to count, and there are always those in power who want to make others' sex lives their business. During the time these incarcerations and forced treatments were going on, it shouldn't have mattered whether the women were prostitutes or promiscuous women or just regular students or members of the workforce or even virgins. The fact that men wrote these laws and were instrumental in carrying them out said a great deal about the general treatment of women in society at the time.

When Nina McCall was released from her jailhouse, she was told her treatment was over and that she was cured. How did the medical staff know? If effective treatments for sexually transmitted diseases had not yet been fully developed and were not successful, how could someone be deemed cured? Possibly because there was no venereal disease present in the first place. How many women were given endless, painful treatments who never had an infection to begin with? And how many had an infection and were treated with useless medications only to later be told they were cured when they were not?

One thing is certain: no one can read THE TRIALS OF NINA McCALL without getting angry - upset with the times, the men, the women who cooperated with the men (public health nurses), the government, and the medical profession for allowing this Plan to happen in this way. The United States was certainly not a "kinder, gentler" nation during these times. For those interested in more on the subject, author Michael Lowenthal wrote a novel entitled CHARITY GIRL which told a similar story about a shopgirl in Boston who endured something similar to Nina McCall. Lowenthal's book is not as anger producing, possibly because he wrote it as fiction. Stern's book is much more compelling because it truly upsets the reader and makes one think about what we need to do in this country so that an American Plan never happens again.

A majority of the book is about the false imprisonment, questionable services for and eventual trial of Nina McCall all in the name of the betterment of America. Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of government overreaching, racism, sexism and religious bias in the plan used to help keep the soldiers and general men safe from Sexually Transmitted Infections. Also, as the author states in the epilogue, prostitution has had a much larger role in American history than one would imagine. I never really gave much thought to the world's oldest profession between wild West brothels and the spattering of legal or blind-eyed places that support that occupation in recent years. It was an interesting and frustrating, from the standpoint of seeing what the "land of the free" will do to keep it such, read.

How often we women turn on our own.Stern discusses one part of the movement in the early 20th century to criminalise female sexuality. Between 1918 and 1950 thousands of women were incarcerated and forcibly subjected to dangerous and experimental medical treatments, forcibly sterilised and publicly shamed for the merest suspicion they were sexually active or infected with an STI. As part and parcel of the American eugenics movement , the American Plan was instigated by women, and often enforced by women. Stern's illustration of this shameful period in U.S history is becoming increasingly relevant in a sociopolitical climate where women's rights are quickly eroding. This book is well written and detailed. Overall recommended for history buffs and those interested in women' issues.

I enjoy reading about little-known, unbelievable events that happened in our country, and that is why I chose this book. This book is about a little-known and shocking event in our country’s history. It is about the American Plan, a plan in effect from the 1910’s into the 1950’s, that originally tried to keep sexually transmitted diseases from spreading. This was the period of our history that was greatly affected by the World Wars, so the American Plan was originally created to stop the spread of the diseases through the ranks of the armed forces.

First, young women who were suspected of “loose” behavior” were followed. Eventually, they were forced to succumb to ineffectual testing of these diseases. If the authorities decided the girl had one of the diseases, she was forced into a facility where she received ineffectual and debilitating treatment.

Nina McCall was one such girl. However, it was never even proven that she ever had the disease. Despite that, she was forcibly incarcerated and given weekly injections of mercury. These were not a proven cure, and, as you can imagine had disastrous results in her health. After she was released after three months, she was continually stalked and forced to continue painful treatments. When she tried to disappear, her mother was threatened by social workers.

I had thought this book was a biography about Nina. However, I found it to be a very detailed account of the history and furtherance of the American Plan, a little-known plan to protect soldiers from diseases thought to be spread by promiscuous women. It is a well-researched and detailed historical account.

I was given a free copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

I'm sitting here trying to come up with the right words to express my thoughts. They won't come. I think I'm still in shock. What I can immediately tell you is don't hesitate; read this book.

Scott Stern is a talented writer. His style is narrative nonfiction, similar to Erik Larson's writing. He puts us in the moment, with all the emotions of the people involved and the turmoil surrounding the events. I felt it all happening and saw it playing out.

The research is impeccable. Stern clearly put his heart and soul, along with an immense amount of time and energy, into writing this book.

And now the content, which is where words fail me. How had I never heard of the American Plan? How could my own country, the supposed "land of the free", randomly pluck women off the streets, force them to submit to gynecological exams, and lock them away without even a basic court hearing? I am appalled that, not only did this happen, but it went on for decades. I am shocked at the absolute media silence surrounding inhumane treatment.

Within the pages of this book, we see misogyny at its core, at a time when government and police forces were very much male-dominated. We see how fear drives racism and bigotry. We see how war provides cover for all sorts of atrocious behavior, right here within our own borders, perpetrated by those in power upon those who are powerless.

I cannot properly express the impact this book had on me. Scott Stern gave us the gift of unearthing all the dirty secrets and laying them out for us to see. I hope everyone will pick up a copy of this book and give Nina McCall, and all the women like her, the courtesy of acknowledging what was done to them under the guise of the so-called American Plan.

*I received an advance copy from the publisher, via Amazon Vine, in exchange for my honest review.*