The important but largely forgotten Chamberlain-Kahn Act, also called the “American Plan,” allowed for the incarceration of women with sexually transmitted diseases under the guise of protecting the nation and particularly the armed forces. In the context of the novel, when Ruth Foster gets out of the solitary confinement of “meditation” and enters quarantine, Baker explains this law, saying that the facility was built in 1927 to “reeducate women,” though Stanley Newell later tells Ruth that the facility was initially a women’s penal colony. As of 1941, Baker explains, “the government is ramping it up again” (52) in order to prepare for the United States’ entry into World War II. Historically, the government at both the national and local levels used the Chamberlain-Kahn Act as a way to control women’s bodies and choices, especially concerning their sexual activities.

When World War I began in Europe in 1914, Raymond Fosdick led the Bureau of Social Hygiene to investigate illicit sexual activities by soldiers in army camps on the U.S./Mexico border. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, Fosdick turned his attention suppressing sex work near military training camps nationwide. The bureau estimated that one-third of the men had contracted a venereal disease that rendered them incapable of fighting, though this estimate is now understood to be incorrect.