The Ladies She Left Behind | Scott W. Stern

Early in 1938, a girl named Addie Odear in Lexington, Kentucky, wrote Eleanor Roosevelt a letter. Interesting to the primary girl’s “graciousness and kindness,” she requested for recommendation “as to the proper way to proceed in a matter which is very close to my heart.” Two days after the letter arrived, a employees member in Roosevelt’s workplace thought of the author’s request: she labored at an establishment that wanted cash to determine services to deal with younger ladies contaminated with syphilis, a prevalent and infrequently asymptomatic sexually transmitted an infection. The “fight against syphilis,” she wrote, “is the Lord’s work.”

Odear sat on the board of the Kentucky department of the Florence Crittenton Mission, which ran dozens of residential establishments for girls and women throughout america. The Crittenton Properties, which operated from the Nineties till properly into the 20th century—some had been nonetheless open within the Nineteen Eighties—had been lauded for compassionately “uplifting” unwed moms and intercourse employees. The Crittenton identify, gushed one account from the Nineteen Thirties, “is synonymous with mercy and love and help for unfortunate girls in their most tragic hour.”

Over the past twenty years, plenty of the roughly 1.5 million former inmates have, with journalists and students, revealed that the properties had been in truth websites of abuse the place pregnant ladies had been coerced into surrendering their kids to adoption. Much less well-known is that lots of the Crittenton properties additionally incarcerated ladies convicted or merely suspected of committing vaguely outlined “morals” offenses, comparable to waywardness or vagrancy, in addition to ladies thought of more likely to unfold venereal illnesses—particularly syphilis or gonorrhea. Therefore Addie Odear’s request: she needed funds for “quarantine facilities,” she wrote, to which “syphilitic” younger ladies might be dedicated, ostensibly voluntarily. Many such “voluntary” services, nonetheless, had lengthy been used to incarcerate ladies that police and public well being authorities merely suspected of getting syphilis or gonorrhea—and a fantastic many extra would observe go well with within the years to return.

Six days after Odear’s letter arrived at her workplace, Roosevelt forwarded it to Thomas Parran Jr., the US surgeon common, together with a word: “Is there any way in which these people could be helped?” Parran replied to the primary girl that Odear’s letter “impresses me with the very great need for additional Federal assistance in dealing with the urgent problem which confronts the Florence Crittentone [sic] Home”—that’s, “syphilitic” younger ladies.

“You may recall that I talked with you last year concerning my hope that Federal assistance for venereal disease control could be provided,” he continued. He hooked up copies of a number of payments that, if handed, “would make possible a real national attack upon the venereal diseases.” Parran added a handwritten postscript indicating that Henry Morgenthau Jr., then the treasury secretary, “expects to discuss this with the President today.” The primary girl “appreciated” the data, her secretary later replied to Parran. “She asks if you will please keep Miss Odear’s plea in mind if the proposed legislation is passed.”

The laws did cross later in 1938, with no single dissenting vote in Congress. The Venereal Ailments Management Act offered state well being officers with tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars} to “control” the unfold of STIs—via training, remedy clinics, premarital testing, and extra punitive measures. Within the following years, aided in no small half by these funds, officers throughout the nation intensified longstanding practices of detaining, incarcerating, and forcibly medicating 1000’s of ladies suspected of getting such infections. To distinguish it from the sooner French and English “plans” to manage STIs and prostitution (the previous compelled intercourse employees to register with the state and the latter subjected them to common police supervision), this program grew to become recognized on the time because the American Plan.¹

It’s not clear if, within the late Nineteen Thirties, Odear or Roosevelt knew concerning the abuse occurring inside Crittenton properties and related services, and neither might have predicted how briskly this system of incarceration would speed up because the US mobilized for World Battle II. But Roosevelt, for her half, would quickly come to know extra about it. Her correspondence with Parran regarding Odear is amongst a number of paperwork in her archival papers associating her with the American Plan. Her involvement was at all times peripheral, usually mediated by Parran, and no deeper than that of many different reformers of her time. And but this stuff in her papers—by no means earlier than cited, as far as I’m conscious—are price scrutinizing, not despite their incidental high quality however due to it. Exactly as a result of it was so informal, so seamlessly woven into the remainder of her activism, her connection to the Plan reveals how simply reform efforts led by the highly effective can curdle into one thing coercive. The purpose of finding out it isn’t to disparage Roosevelt or diminish her achievements in civil or human rights however to know the contradictions of the well-meaning, elite-led social reform she championed, which allowed the well-off to find out what was greatest for the marginalized—even when the “best” public well being strategies of the day entailed the incarceration of tens of 1000’s of poor ladies.   

Initiated within the late 1910s on the urging of federal and state officers decided to guard the younger troopers massing for World Battle I from the “scourges” of prostitution and venereal illness, the American Plan was a part of a broader campaign referred to as the “social hygiene” motion, which sought to wield public well being methods to handle the social causes of syphilis and intercourse work. Many social hygienists (such because the outstanding New York doctor Prince A. Morrow) believed that venereal illness and promiscuity had been, in impact, a matter of heredity. Whereas merely “silly” or “untrained” ladies might be reformed, the pondering went, a major proportion of intercourse employees had been congenitally “feebleminded,” within the language of the time. “Virtually half of the country’s prostitutes are mentally deficient,” the navy psychologist Paul A. Mertz wrote within the Journal of the American Medical Affiliation in 1919. Feeblemindedness in ladies, in flip, was thought to manifest in prostitution or different types of deviancy.

This type of pondering grew out of eugenics, which held that some individuals are genetically endowed with superior intelligence or ethics whereas others are cursed by poor genes with stupidity, indolence, or criminality. Within the first half of the 20th century, this was a well-liked social principle, and eugenicists (particularly these within the US) maintained that the human race might be “improved” via selective breeding, achieved by “positive” applications comparable to household planning and marriage counseling in addition to “negative” applications comparable to institutionalization. 

Many social hygienists had been outstanding promoters of this system of “eugenic” sterilization—most notably Paul Popenoe, writer of the primary main eugenics textbook, who, as a federal agent within the late 1910s, pushed officers in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to incarcerate as many ladies with STIs as they may, Black and Hispanic ladies above all. Throughout the nation, directors of the American Plan subjected incarcerated ladies to intelligence exams to find out feeblemindedness. A memorandum, despatched in 1917 from the federal authorities to each state governor, demanded such testing, to be adopted by “the commitment to institutions of non-diseased prostitutes for industrial training and for the commitment of all feeble-minded prostitutes to custodial care.”

The eugenicists wrought extraordinary hurt, particularly towards ladies of coloration, poor ladies, and immigrants. Nicely over 60,000 individuals had been sterilized in america between the Nineties and Nineteen Seventies beneath legal guidelines “aimed primarily at the female habitual moral offender,” because the historian Barbara Meil Hobson has written.² Few data survive, however that quantity clearly included some ladies incarcerated beneath the American Plan. Incarceration itself, for that matter, was a option to forestall ladies from having intercourse or reproducing. Hundreds had been caged beneath these initiatives from the 1910s via the Nineteen Fifties (and, in just a few locations, a number of years longer). Native police, federal brokers, navy personnel, and public well being officers scrutinized the streets, particularly close to navy bases and in main cities, for girls they thought appeared promiscuous. Any girl “reasonably suspected” of getting an STI might be forcibly examined, often by a male doctor; those that examined constructive might be locked, with out due course of, in a detention hospital, reformatory, or native jail for remedy and so-called ethical rehabilitation.

The American Plan was not hidden; politicians spoke about it earlier than roaring crowds, justifying it as serving to the downtrodden. The Plan’s architects—and particularly its feminine directors, who had been a part of the primary era of feminine school graduates to acquire federal employment—believed that it was in the most effective curiosity of poor ladies to be institutionalized, for inside such establishments they may obtain vocational coaching, Christian proselytization, and obligatory medical remedy.

A small variety of the educated elite, lots of them Quakers or Christian Scientists, opposed the American Plan. One feminine doctor, missionary, and egalitarian Christian thinker, Katharine Bushnell, deplored in a 1918 letter the “pretended discovery that ‘about half’ the prostitutes are feeble-minded, and must be confined—not temporarily, but for the rest of their lives.” Such critiques didn’t win over many policymakers, nonetheless, and elite opposition was confined primarily to letters and pamphlets; ultimately a number of feminine federal directors additionally resigned in protest.

In contrast, the American Plan’s most relentless adversaries had been its victims. Hundreds of ladies and women incarcerated beneath the Plan and different morals legal guidelines escaped from behind bars, set their websites of captivity on hearth, assaulted their guards, sued their captors, engaged in starvation strikes, and spoke out. “Goddamn these doctors,” wrote one intercourse employee who, after testing constructive for an STI within the Nineteen Thirties, was sterilized towards her will.

Historians have fought bitterly over learn how to interpret the truth that lots of the twentieth century’s most influential and progressive social actions included strains of eugenicist pondering. There have been robust and enduring ties between the eugenics motion and the labor motion, the kid welfare motion, and the social welfare motion. Eugenics was embraced and promoted by college presidents, US presidents, Supreme Courtroom justices, journalists, novelists, physicians, social reformers, and almost each main spiritual denomination within the nation. This was equally true of the American Plan. As I’ve written elsewhere, many seemingly progressive people and organizations of the early twentieth century expressed a point of help for the Plan, together with Roger Baldwin, Earl Warren, Fiorello La Guardia, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Medical Affiliation, the American Bar Affiliation, the Woman Scouts, and even at the very least one outstanding Quaker, Martha P. Falconer.

To trendy readers such hyperlinks could appear stunning, and in latest a long time students have accomplished appreciable work to contextualize them. Eugenics offered a handy legitimizing vocabulary for anti-immigrant prejudice within the early twentieth century, permitting many to solid their bigotry within the idiom of science. In a interval characterised by excessive charges of poverty, illiteracy, illness, and alcoholism, eugenics additionally gave some highly effective individuals a option to clarify this struggling with out acknowledging how a lot of it was because of the financial system during which they’d prospered. The impact was to shift the blame for social ills onto the marginalized. “Does eugenics mean less sympathy for the unfortunate?” requested a 1926 publication of the American Eugenics Society. “It means a much better understanding of them, and a more concerted attempt to alleviate their suffering, by seeing to it that everything possible is done to have fewer hereditary defectives.”

The hyperlink between the eugenics motion and the contraception motion has been notably controversial. “All too often,” the historian Alexandra Minna Stern lamented in her ebook Eugenic Nation, the advanced debates over the legacy of eugenics and the figures who embraced it “are distilled into a thumbnail sketch of the hot-button figure of Margaret Sanger.”³ Students (together with Dorothy Roberts and Angela Davis) have analyzed Sanger’s decades-long affiliation with eugenics proponents and organizations and her voluminous anti-Black, anti-immigrant, and pro-sterilization writings. Others (comparable to Ellen Chesler) have argued that she was personally extra skeptical of genetic determinism, and that the contraception motion’s affiliation with eugenics was much less a passionate embrace and extra a strategic political alliance. Nonetheless others—usually conservative and spiritual antiabortion advocates—have seized on Sanger’s ties to racists and eugenicists in an try to delegitimize the struggles for reproductive freedom and justice in our personal time, usually with the purpose of defunding Deliberate Parenthood, the group Sanger helped create. Even Clarence Thomas has tried to yoke trendy reproductive rights to Sanger’s eugenic legacy.  

The American Plan was a notably in style expression of eugenicist thought. One nationwide ballot from 1937, from George Gallup’s new agency, discovered {that a} majority of People believed that STI remedy “should be obligatory.” As one interviewee stated, “I’m in favor of any steps at all that would help control the disease. Nothing the government could do would be too drastic.”

Eleanor Roosevelt is usually remembered, for good cause, as a paragon of human rights, and ladies’s rights specifically. From her lobbying for anti-lynching laws and vocal criticism of segregation within the Nineteen Thirties and Nineteen Forties to her work chairing the United Nations Fee on Human Rights and drafting the Common Declaration of Human Rights within the Nineteen Forties and Nineteen Fifties, she persistently used her place to push for social change. Elevating consciousness about worthy causes, connecting the unvoiced with these in energy, and selling her most well-liked insurance policies appeared to her pure components of her position as first girl, which she expanded far past its conventional strictures of hostess-in-chief.

Typically these priorities put her at odds together with her husband. Within the phrases of Eleanor’s newest biographer, David Michaelis, Franklin Roosevelt believed “that the development of the Japanese cranium” might clarify sure “‘racial characteristics’—nefariousness, for example, and trickiness, and ruthlessness.” In keeping with Michaelis, that perception knowledgeable the president’s program of Japanese internment, which “shocked” Eleanor. “Incarceration of Japanese Americans…put a lasting wedge between them as Eleanor’s primary role in Franklin’s wartime presidency became that of a self-appointed agitator.”

Throughout Roosevelt’s years within the White Home, lots of of individuals throughout the nation wrote her immediately, together with about issues of public well being. In 1939, as an example, a person from New York despatched her a letter to say that he had been rejected from medical faculty and request her intercession; in 1940 a Philadelphia man wrote her describing a plan for “socialized medicine.” The powers of the primary girl had been restricted, however Roosevelt usually took it upon herself to ahead these missives to the suitable officers. Each of these males had been handed alongside to Parran.

Parran had been related to the Roosevelts for a number of years. Born in 1892, he joined the Public Well being Service as a younger doctor and devoted the higher a part of his skilled life to governmental well being efforts—notably the struggle to deal with syphilis and gonorrhea. In 1918 he pushed cities in Alabama, the place he was stationed, to detain and forcibly deal with younger ladies suspected of getting both an infection. His consideration returned to that state over a decade later, when he oversaw the now-infamous Tuskegee research, during which the federal government denied medical care to lots of of poor, Black Alabamans with syphilis. In 1930 he joined the administration of New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt as state well being commissioner, during which capability he promoted intercourse training and public STI clinics whereas giving speeches extolling the advantages of “compulsory treatment or quarantine” for “socially irresponsible” sufferers.

Eleanor, too, was invested in the reason for containing the unfold of STIs. In 1924, because the chair of the primary ladies’s committee to current proposals for the Democratic Occasion platform, she and her fellow members pushed for together with “sex education and venereal disease prevention.” She was an ally of the American Social Hygiene Affiliation, one of many loudest organizations pushing for aggressive authorities measures to fight STIs, and particularly legal guidelines to incarcerate their carriers. (She would ultimately increase a lot cash for the ASHA that the group would take into account giving her its highest award.) By the Nineteen Thirties, this mutual curiosity had drawn Parran and Eleanor nearer collectively.

Because it grew to become more and more doubtless that the nation would enter World Battle II, the primary girl and the surgeon common started exchanging letters detailing their shared perception that extra must be accomplished to preemptively fight the venereal scourge afflicting the navy. Within the spring of 1940, at Parran’s suggestion, Eleanor hosted a White Home screening of Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, a controversial movie lionizing Paul Ehrlich, the German scientist who tried to find a remedy for syphilis. (His “cure” was reasonably efficient but so toxic that few sufferers might tolerate its yearslong administration.) A month after the screening, Eleanor delivered a speech concerning the movie, for which Parran offered her with analysis, to a gathering of congressional wives.

A yr later a memo landed on the primary girl’s desk detailing the obvious rise of syphilis and gonorrhea amongst troopers and sailors. “We feel,” it learn, “that there is very little being done to combat the venereal menace in the District of Columbia.” The memo concluded that “infected registrants should be forced to take treatment.” Eleanor took it to Franklin, who, she later wrote to Parran, felt “very strongly” that its options be adequately funded. For his half, Parran was assured that such measures would quickly be realized beneath the town’s “quarantine laws.” Later that yr, with the president incensed over the surgeon common’s impertinently public requires extra excessive measures towards STIs (Parran had even cowritten a ebook attacking the secretaries of struggle and the navy for not cracking down on intercourse work with ample zeal), Parran appealed to Eleanor for help. He claimed to not be “asking you to intervene, now or later,” however requested that she take into account publicizing the extremity of the scenario. “It is time,” learn the literature Parran handed alongside to the primary girl, for municipalities throughout the nation “to give some thought to the prevention of infection as well as the treatment of the infected person.”

The US entered the struggle days after Parran despatched his plea. Within the identify of defending the troops, the federal authorities renewed its marketing campaign towards ladies suspected of promoting intercourse or having STIs; over the course of the struggle, officers incarcerated tens of 1000’s of ladies with out due course of. Considered one of Parran’s staff raised considerations about “the ‘prostitute prison camp’ aspect” of the detention services, and one other official, Charles P. Taft II—second-in-command within the wartime Federal Safety Company (FSA), the son of the previous president, and the brother of a US senator—lamented “the lack so far of rehabilitation and efforts at employment for the girls who come out of the hospitals.” However the marketing campaign carried on.

On June 9, 1943, the primary girl spoke at a convention on “Women’s Role in Social Protection” on the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Social Safety Administration. Taft and plenty of different senior federal officers (many affiliated with the FSA, which had organized the convention) gathered there alongside representatives from lots of the nation’s most essential ladies’s organizations, such because the Younger Ladies’s Christian Affiliation (YWCA), Normal Federation of Ladies’s Golf equipment, Nationwide Council of Catholic Ladies, Nationwide Council of Jewish Ladies, American Affiliation of College Ladies, and American Medical Ladies’s Affiliation, to speak about locking up the poor and contaminated.

The primary audio system, together with Taft, weren’t coy concerning the ongoing efforts at incarceration. They spoke at size about “quarantine hospitals” and “rapid treatment centers for the women who are picked up by the police.” Following them, Roosevelt targeted on what we would now name the social determinants of well being. The “real roots” of venereal illness, she declared, “lie in the fact that we do not face our community conditions. Wherever you find poverty and dirt, lack of opportunity, and lack of education, you are going to find venereal disease. It just can’t be helped. What we are facing is the need for a better organization of community services in every community.” It was, taken alone, a completely unobjectionable speech.

Although the minutes of this assembly survive within the Nationwide Archives, they don’t reveal the shut collaboration between Roosevelt and the officers who spoke earlier than her, who hoped to make use of the primary girl’s attendance to legitimize their trigger and safe “the full support of women.” In keeping with letters in Roosevelt’s papers, as soon as she agreed to attend, the officers then labored round her calendar to select a date for the convention; she even allowed them to recommend the topic of her speech. To assist her put together, they handed alongside items of literature, every consultant of the harms of their strategy. “Venereal Disease, Prostitution and War: A Sound Legislative Program for the Control of Venereal Disease and the Repression of Prostitution Founded Upon Experience” catalogued the legal guidelines enabling the federal government’s “war” towards the venereal scourge, together with statutes enabling obligatory examination and quarantine. “Preliminary Report: Social Protection Study: Girls and Women Apprehended by Police in San Antonio, Texas, for Prostitution and Allied Offenses” studied fifty ladies and women, some as younger as fourteen, “apprehended by the police” on morals fees, of whom thirty-seven had been being compulsorily handled for STIs. It was (like many different federal stories from this time) rife with eugenic language, together with the element that two of the ladies had been “mentally incompetent,” whereas one other was “very low-grade.” “Techniques for Repressing Unorganized Prostitution” detailed legislation enforcement protocols that included the incarceration of contaminated ladies however not contaminated males.

On the finish of the assembly, the ladies current unanimously adopted extra punitive resolutions. They endorsed “a nationwide program to prevent and control venereal disease” as an “imperative war necessity and an indispensable part of a continuous welfare program.” Extra particularly they known as for the “quarantine of infected persons who refuse to take voluntary treatment of venereal disease” and the “strict enforcement of all laws, ordinances, and regulations that pertain to prostitution activities,” in addition to the “social rehabilitation where possible, of infected persons in need of redirection.” It’s not clear whether or not Roosevelt herself voted.

All of this reveals that by 1943, if not earlier, Roosevelt knew in nice element concerning the ongoing federal program to incarcerate 1000’s of ladies and took part in a convention meant to construct public help for it. “I was happy to be able to help,” she wrote afterward. An apparently honest want to forestall the unfold of STIs led her to embrace a program constructed on eugenic assumptions concerning the individuals who unfold them. She undoubtedly had details about the harms of the American Plan, however she might not have acknowledged these harms for what they had been. The historical past of elite reform initiatives is filled with such failures.

At the least one incarcerated girl did write to Roosevelt immediately. Mamie LaPlant, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, despatched a handwritten plea in late 1943, which Mikaela Gerwin situated within the archival papers of the Bureau of Indian Affairs six years in the past, when Gerwin was a senior at Princeton. LaPlant defined that she had been detained by Montana police on suspicion of getting an STI, examined by a well being officer, and finally incarcerated for remedy. “Please help me out,” she wrote the primary girl. A member of Roosevelt’s employees forwarded LaPlant’s letter to a Public Well being Service doctor, asking him to “take whatever action you deem advisable.” He handed the letter on to an Indian Service agent, who wrote again to LaPlant that he had no authority to assist her, as she had been “committed for necessary treatment under the state quarantine laws.”