I'm inclined to think this was bipartisan, but it reflects a long standing mental illness in parts of the USA;
America's Forgotten Mass Imprisonment of Women Believed to Be Sexually Immoral
Under the 'American Plan,' women could be detained for sitting in a restaurant alone, changing jobsāor, often, for no reason at all.
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For much of the 20th century in America, a little-known but widespread government program locked people up without trials simply for having sexually transmitted infectionsāand then forced them to undergo dangerous, poisonous ātreatments.ā
If they were women, that is.
Take, for example, the nearly two dozen women rounded up by authorities on a single day in Sacramento, California in 1919. ...
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Margaret Hennesseyās experience was far from unusual. She had been detained under a program she likely had never heard of: the āAmerican Plan.ā From the 1910s through the 1950s, and in some places into the 1960s and 1970s, tens of thousandsāperhaps hundreds of thousandsāof American women were detained and forcibly examined for STIs. The program was modeled after similar ones in Europe, under which authorities stalked āsuspiciousā women, arresting, testing and imprisoning them.
If the women tested positive, U.S. officials locked them away in penal institutions with no due process. While many records of the program have since been lost or destroyed, womenās forced internment could range from a few days to many months. Inside these institutions, records show, the women were often injected with mercury and forced to ingest arsenic-based drugs, the most common treatments for syphilis in the early part of the century. If they misbehaved, or if they failed to show āproperā ladylike deference, these women could be beaten, doused with cold water, thrown into solitary confinementāor even sterilized.
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Enforcement of the American Plan ended by the 1970s, amid the rise of the
Civil Rights Movement, the womenās lib movement and the sex-workers-rights movement. It had lasted in many places for half a century; but today, half a century later, few people have ever heard of it. Even fewer are aware that the American Plan lawsāthe ones passed in the late 1910s, enabling officials to examine people merely āreasonably suspectedā of having STIsāare still on the books, in some form, in every state in the nation. Some of these laws have been altered or amended, and some have been absorbed into broader public-health statutes, but each state still has the power to examine āreasonably suspectedā people and isolate the infected ones, if health officials deem such isolation necessary.
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Under the 'American Plan,' women could be detained for no reason.
www.history.com