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. He stated, “We cannot afford to have any condition of that kind in connection with American troops,” and the so-called “American Plan for public hygiene” was passed in 1918 and “allowed police to arrest any woman within five miles of a military camp to test her for venereal disease […]. If a woman tested positive, she could be interred in a ‘labor camp’ until ‘cured’” (“Women: The Social Hygiene Movement.” California Lutheran University). This policy and the practices it spurred were deeply rooted in misogyny, and its supporters ran through the highest levels of federal government.

Furthermore, the American Plan was widely supported by politicians at the local and state levels, such as New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and California Governor Earl Warren (Stern, Scott W. “America’s Forgotten Mass Imprisonment of Women Believed to Be Sexually Immoral.” History, 30 June 2025). In 1918, the United States attorney general wrote to every U.S. district judge, imploring them not to interfere with the law’s enforcement. During the era in which the novel is set, even the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union “sent a memorandum encouraging its local branches to cooperate with officials enforcing it” (Stern). Many of the women in the Colony complained that they were not given due process.

As reform institutions sprang up all over the country, the women incarcerated there were frequently mistreated and infantilized. Even more egregiously, they were injected with mercury and arsenic-based drugs; Everhart dramatizes this issue when the women in the colony are treated with Neosalvaran. Historically, if the women in such facilities did not show “‘proper’ ladylike deference,” they would be “beaten, doused with cold water, thrown into solitary confinement—or even sterilized” (Stern). Thus, the group punishments inflicted on women at Everhart’s fictitious Colony have a firm basis in historical fact, as do the enforced sterilizations that are inflicted upon Stella and Frances.

From a 21st-century perspective, the American Plan was an inherently sexist program “that made no sense from a public-health perspective,” and many of the women who were targeted had often done nothing wrong. Documentation of the era shows that women were “detained and examined for sitting at a restaurant alone; for changing jobs; for being with a man; for walking down a street in a way a male official found suspicious; and, often, for no reason at all” (Stern). In the novel, characters such as Ruth, Lucy, Opal, and Josephine understand what the government officials did not: that the law was founded on faulty premises and led to massive corruption at all levels of government. As a result, many women were unjustly detained, “treated,” and punished for failing to live up to an arbitrary standard of “respectability,” an issue made all the more damning by the fact that these sexist accusations were only ever directed at women, and never at men.