I’m posting it here, because I have not done any fact-checking, but the the premise behind this book is shocking and intriguing. It is amazing what things a war far away can be used to justify.
During World War I, 30,000 American women were rounded up, and half of them were detained, often for months, for the supposed purpose of preventing the spread of venereal diseases in soldiers. Some of the arrested were prostitutes, while others were so-called charity girls, young women who picked up men at dance halls simply to have a good time. That the incarceration of these women at detention camps surrounded by barbed wire did nothing to change the rate at which soldiers were contracting STDs was a piece of information that the Committee on the Prevention of Social Evils Surrounding Military Camps was not much interested in during the late summer of 1918. Nor did the committee seem to care that it was often the men who had infected the women.
The unfortunate female detainees at 43 sites around the country were subjected to hard labor, forced medical treatment, unspeakable humiliations and even rape. Their ordeal provides the inspiration for Michael Lowenthal’s lively and illuminating novel Charity Girl.