The Trials of Nina McCall
Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison "Promiscuous" Women
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Narrated by:
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Erin Bennett
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By:
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Scott W. Stern
About this listen
The nearly forgotten story of the American Plan, a government program to regulate women's bodies and sexuality - and how they fought back - told through the lens of one of its survivors.
“A consistently surprising page-turner...a brilliant study of the way social anxieties have historically congealed in state control over women’s bodies and behavior.” (New York Times Book Review)
Nina McCall was one of many women unfairly imprisoned by the United States government throughout the 20th century. Tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of women and girls were locked up - usually without due process - simply because officials suspected these women were prostitutes, carrying STIs, or just "promiscuous."
This discriminatory program, dubbed the "American Plan", lasted from the 1910s into the 1950s, implicating a number of luminaries, including Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Earl Warren, and even Eliot Ness, while laying the foundation for the modern system of women's prisons. In some places, vestiges of the Plan lingered into the 1960s and 1970s, and the laws that undergirded it remain on the books to this day.
Nina McCall's story provides crucial insight into the lives of countless other women incarcerated under the American Plan. Stern demonstrates the pain and shame felt by these women and details the multitude of mortifications they endured, both during and after their internment. Yet thousands of incarcerated women rioted, fought back against their oppressors, or burned their detention facilities to the ground; they jumped out of windows or leapt from moving trains or scaled barbed-wire fences in order to escape. And, as Nina McCall did, they sued their captors.
In an age of renewed activism surrounding harassment, health care, prisons, women's rights, and the power of the state, this virtually lost chapter of our history is vital listening.
©2018 Scott Stern (P)2018 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“A powerful report on a relevant women’s movement deservedly brought to light over a century after it occurred.” (Kirkus Reviews)
“Before reading this book, I had never heard of either the American Plan or Nina McCall. After reading it, I will be unlikely to forget either. Scott W. Stern has done a remarkably thorough job of laying out the evidence, brick by brick by brick, that damns the systematic incarceration of women with dubious sexual histories as one of the more shameful chapters in our nation’s history.” (Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down)
“In gripping and vivid detail, this book describes government officials, judges, and physicians who worked together for much of the twentieth century to surveil, imprison, experiment upon, and forever traumatize countless women. Perhaps more important, this book introduces us to brave women who refused to accept this barbaric treatment and who, against great odds, finally brought those same men to account. As the author makes clear, we must learn their story because what happened to them then could well happen to us now.” (Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water)
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Story
Margaret A. Burnham challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in harrowing cases between 1920 and 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system of the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the line from slavery to the legal structures of this period—and through to today.
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Heartbreaking
- By sharon on 11-24-22
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American Midnight
- The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis
- By: Adam Hochschild
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 15 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a groundbreaking reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threated by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor
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Disturbing yet Reassuring
- By Sams95 on 11-18-22
By: Adam Hochschild
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City of Dreams
- The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York
- By: Tyler Anbinder
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 24 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Tyler Anbinder's story is one of innovators and artists, revolutionaries and rioters, staggering deprivation and soaring triumphs, all playing out against the powerful backdrop of New York City, at once ever changing and profoundly, permanently itself. City of Dreams provides a vivid sense of what New York looked like, sounded like, smelled like, and felt like over the centuries of its development and maturation into the city we know today.
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Even as a history, not engaging
- By Patrick Kelly on 12-03-16
By: Tyler Anbinder
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The Gay Revolution
- The Story of the Struggle
- By: Lillian Faderman
- Narrated by: Donna Postel
- Length: 29 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The Gay Revolution begins in the 1950s, when law classified gays and lesbians as criminals, the psychiatric profession saw them as mentally ill, the churches saw them as sinners, and society victimized them with irrational hatred. Against this dark backdrop, a few brave people began to fight back, paving the way for the revolutionary changes of the 1960s and beyond.
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An outstanding book.
- By David Farley on 10-21-15
By: Lillian Faderman
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Black Detroit
- A People's History of Self-Determination
- By: Herb Boyd
- Narrated by: James Shippy
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The author of Baldwin's Harlem looks at the evolving culture, politics, economics, and spiritual life of Detroit - a blend of memoir, love letter, history, and clear-eyed reportage that explores the city's past, present, and future and its significance to the African American legacy and the nation's fabric.
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Selective Recall
- By Rick on 07-19-17
By: Herb Boyd
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The Eternal Nazi
- From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim
- By: Nicholas Kulish, Souad Mekhennet
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Aribert Heim worked at the Mauthausen concentration camp for only a few months in 1941 but left a devastating mark. According to the testimony of survivors, Heim euthanized patients with injections of gasoline into their hearts. He performed surgeries on otherwise healthy people. Some recalled prisoners' skulls set out on his desk to display perfect sets of teeth. Yet in the chaos of the postwar period, Heim was able to slip away from his dark past and establish himself as a reputable doctor and family man in the resort town of Baden-Baden.
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Not certain about this one...
- By Nancy on 11-24-22
By: Nicholas Kulish, and others
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The Pharmacist of Auschwitz
- The Untold Story
- By: Patricia Posner
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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The Pharmacist of Auschwitz is the little-known story of Victor Capesius, a Bayer pharmaceutical salesman from Romania, who, at the age of 35, joined the Nazi SS in 1943 and quickly became the chief pharmacist at the largest death camp, Auschwitz. Based in part on previously classified documents, Patricia Posner exposes Capesius's reign of terror at the camp, his escape from justice, and how a handful of courageous survivors and a single brave prosecutor finally brought him to trial for murder 20 years after the end of the war.
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I respect every victim of the Holocaust to....
- By LisalouRN on 08-26-17
By: Patricia Posner
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Unspeakable
- The Story of Junius Wilson
- By: Susan Burch, Hannah Joyner
- Narrated by: Corey Johnson
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Junius Wilson (1908-2001) spent 76 years at a state mental hospital in Goldsboro, North Carolina, including 6 in the criminal ward. He had never been declared insane by a medical professional or found guilty of any criminal charge. But he was deaf and Black in the Jim Crow South. Unspeakable is the story of his life.
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Nuanced look at a complicated case of injustice
- By Karla on 08-06-24
By: Susan Burch, and others
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Malcolm X
- A Life of Reinvention
- By: Manning Marable
- Narrated by: G. Valmont Thomas
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Of the great figure in 20th-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins' bullets at age 39. Through his tireless work and countless speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands of black Americans to create better lives and stronger communities while establishing the template for the self-actualized, independent African American man.
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invites further reading on Malcolm X
- By connie on 05-14-11
By: Manning Marable
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Freedom's Detective
- The Secret Service, the Ku Klux Klan and the Man Who Masterminded America's First War on Terror
- By: Charles Lane
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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Freedom’s Detective reveals the untold story of the Reconstruction-era US Secret Service and their battle against the Ku Klux Klan, through the career of its controversial chief, Hiram C. Whitle.
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Evan Review
- By Evan on 06-23-19
By: Charles Lane
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Root and Branch
- Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation
- By: Rawn James Jr.
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education is widely considered a seminal point in the battle to end segregation, but it was in fact the culmination of a decades-long legal campaign. Root and Branch is the epic story of the two fiercely dedicated lawyers who led the fight from county courthouses to the marble halls of the Supreme Court, and, in the process, laid the legal foundations of the civil rights movement.
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Superb story
- By Philo-sophia on 01-26-12
By: Rawn James Jr.
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The Defender
- How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America; from the Age of the Pullman Porters to the Age of Obama
- By: Ethan Michaeli
- Narrated by: William Hughes
- Length: 22 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Giving voice to the voiceless, the Chicago Defender condemned Jim Crow, catalyzed the Great Migration, and focused the electoral power of black America. Robert S. Abbott founded the Defender in 1905, smuggled hundreds of thousands of copies into the most isolated communities in the segregated South, and was dubbed a "Modern Moses", becoming one of the first black millionaires in the process.
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There's an unexpected genius here
- By Porter on 01-19-19
By: Ethan Michaeli
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Votes for Women!
- American Suffragists and the Battle for the Ballot
- By: Winifred Conkling
- Narrated by: Christina Moore
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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On August 18, 1920, American women finally won the right to vote. Ratification of the 19th Amendment was the culmination of an almost 80-year fight in which some of the fiercest, most passionate women in history marched, protested, and sometimes broke the law in to achieve this huge leap toward equal rights. In this expansive yet personal volume, author Winifred Conkling covers not only the suffragists' achievements and politics but also the private journeys that fueled their passion and led them to become women's champions.
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Thank you, ladies!
- By Stephanie Epps on 04-26-20
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Fight Like Hell
- The Untold History of American Labor
- By: Kim Kelly
- Narrated by: Em Grosland
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America’s civil rights movement. These are only some of the heroes who propelled American labor’s relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law.
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It is an important historical cause. Well written, well performed.
- By Amazon Customer on 06-18-24
By: Kim Kelly
What listeners say about The Trials of Nina McCall
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- joe sample
- 06-06-20
Unknown misogyny
This historical account of America’s assault on women’s sexuality is illuminating. I was unaware of the American Plan and am appalled, saddened, and completely unsurprised. A must read.
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- Score623
- 02-09-19
Incredible story but the book is TOO LONG
This book literally could be 1/5 of the current length and equally as informative. I never skip ahead when I’m reading, but found myself constantly jumping ahead in this book and not missing a thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love the author’s passion and diligence in researching every detail, but it was just too painfully long. And all that being said, every person in the US should know this history so we never repeat the horror! I am grateful the author did bring this hideous history to light!
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