On May 1, 1919, the police arrested Gussie Burns for vagrancy after raiding Flossie Kane's home at 1213 Cass Street, Omaha, Nebraska. The police found two bottles of cocaine in Kane's house and arrested Kane as the keeper of a disorderly house. There were three other women and three men present in the house with Kane during the raid; one of the women was Gussie Burns. The police charged Burns with vagrancy, and the judge convicted and sentenced her to thirty days in jail.[1] After her arrest, a health official, who was most likely male, forced her to submit to a physical examination for venereal disease. The physician probably laid her on a standard operating table with a sheet over her body and tested her for gonorrhea and syphilis.
Burns most likely had to endure the uncomfortable and painful experience of the physician’s invasive inspection.[2] After a few minutes, the physician informed her of the results. The legal record does not tell us what happened in that room or ultimately to Gussie Burns, but it tells us enough to know that her treatment was part of a broader pattern of unlawful confinement and women's resistance.
Near the end of World War I, due to the rampant venereal disease outbreak in the military, the federal government established a collection of laws and practices known as the American Plan to contain the transmission of venereal disease on military bases. The Medical Department of the United States Army indicated that in the 3,500,000 outpatients, venereal disease was the cause of 357,969 of the admissions, hence 10.5 percent in 1928.[3] However, once physicians discovered that most troops had contracted the disease before enlisting, the federal government expanded the American Plan outside of the military. The federal government convinced state governments to enact laws that enabled them to forcibly examine and detain infected individuals
to control the spread of venereal disease. The federal government provided states with a model law to use, and forty states adopted a total of ninety-six venereal disease laws, along with two hundred and twenty-two city ordinances.[4] Although the laws were ostensibly gender-neutral, the government targeted women more frequently than men. Health officials detained 1,072 women in Michigan but only forty-nine men for venereal disease treatment between 1918 and 1919.[5] These numbers resulted from health officials believing prostitution was the primary reason for the spread of venereal disease. Consequently, they used the American Plan to target promiscuous women– especially nonwhite and immigrant women.
Omaha was one of the cities to adopt a venereal disease ordinance. On March 5, 1918, Mayor James Dahlman passed Ordinance No. 9852, authorizing the isolation and quarantine of any person infected with venereal disease "in such a reasonable manner and for such a reasonable period."[6] The ordinance's ambiguous nature gave health officials a great deal of discretion in deciding how to treat venereal disease and who to detain. In turn, they abused their authority to target women like Gussie Burns, who defied the patriarchal ideals of how a woman should act, regardless of whether or not they were prostitutes. In Douglas County, health officials "railroaded" hundreds of women to the Women's Detention Home, often without a warrant or formal complaint. The police would apprehend women on the street or in their homes and imprison them in the Women's Detention Home upon the recommendation of Health Commissioner Ernest T. Manning. The local government refused to grant these women the opportunity to employ counsel and defend themselves in a court of justice. However, when Nellie Atkins threatened to sue Dr. Palmer Findley and the Women’s Detention Home for false imprisonment, and Wilma Rice revealed purported government corruption, Health Commissioner
Manning publicly announced that the health department would no longer send unconvicted women to the Detention Home.[7]
On May 7, 1919, six days after Gussie Burns’s vagrancy arrest, the new mayor, E. D Smith, revised Omaha's venereal disease ordinance, restricting the reach of the Health Department. Ordinance No.10222 allowed public health officials only to examine and detain women convicted of prostitution and other related offenses, such as vagrancy and keeper or inmate of an ill-governed house, legitimizing the already existing practice.[8] Both ordinances were crucial to the subordination of Omaha women in the Progressive Era. They enabled the Women's Detention Home and the Omaha Health Department to perpetuate patriarchal notions of ideal womanhood and subject Burns and hundreds of other women who did not fulfill such norms to repeat abuse.
Unfortunately, Burns was unable to avoid the Women’s Detention Home; on November 28, 1919, the police once again charged her with vagrancy. The next day, Judge James M. Fitzgerald found her guilty and sentenced her to thirty days in the Douglas County jail.
Immediately after her sentencing, a health official forcibly examined Burns and claimed she tested positive for an unspecified venereal disease. Consequently, the new Health Commissioner, Dr. J. F. Edwards sent her to the Omaha Women's Detention Home for treatment.
After four months in the Women's Detention Home enduring continuous abuse, on March 2, 1920, Burns petitioned the judge for a writ of habeas corpus, challenging her confinement.
Burns claimed that the physicians at the Detention Home cured her of her alleged venereal infection. Still, Alta Berger, the Women's Detention Home superintendent, refused to release her
until she consented to a sterilization to remove "certain tubes."[9] Burns claimed she would undergo the procedure if she could select the physician operating on her; however, her consent was presumably involuntary. Retrieving consent through coercion was a common method physicians used to induce women to accept sterilization. Burns most likely consented because she saw doing so as her only way out of the institution. The day after Burns filed her petition, Judge Lee S. Estelle ordered a writ of habeas corpus to Alta Berger, and there was a hearing before Judge Charles A. Goss on March 4, 1919, at 10 am. However, surviving records do not indicate the outcome of the proceeding.[10] Regardless of the outcome, Burns's petition provided insight into women's legal sophistication. Aware of the social prejudices against her and the legal mechanisms designed to oppress her, Burns strategically utilized habeas corpus to fight against abuse in the Omaha Women’s Detention Home, a site of significance in more than a dozen additional cases like hers.
- [1] Omaha daily bee. (Omaha [Neb.]), 13 Feb. 1919. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn99021999/1919-02-13/ed-1/seq-6/ and "In the matter of the application of Gussie Burns for writ of Habeas Corpus." in Petitioning for Freedom: Habeas Corpus in the American West, 1812-1924, edited by Katrina Jagodinsky, et al. University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Accessed August 2, 2023. https://petitioningforfreedom.unl.edu/cases/item/hc.case.ne.1316
- [2] Stern, S. W. (2018). The trials of Nina McCall: sex, surveillance, and the decades-long government plan to imprison “promiscuous” women. Beacon Press, 7.
- [3] Siler, Joseph F., (1928), The Medical Department of the United States. Volume IX Communicable and other Diseases. Digital Collections - National Library of Medicine, 268.
- [4] Furman, B., William, R. C., & National Library of Medicine (U.S.). (1973). A Profile of the United States Public Health Service, 1798-1948. National Institute of Health, 321.
- [5] Stern, S. W. (2019). The Venereal Doctrine: Compulsory Examinations, Sexually Transmitted Infections, and the Rape/Prostitution Divide (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. 3776573), 170. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3776573
- [6] Nebraska, Omaha, Ordinance No. 9852 (1918)
- [7] Omaha daily bee. (Omaha [Neb.]), 03 May 1919. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn99021999/1919-05-03/ed-1/seq-20/
- [8] Nebraska, Omaha, Ordinance No. 10222 (1919)
- [9] During the early twentieth century, several physicians were eugenists. Physicians began advocating for the eugenic movement as venereal diseases rapidly spread, and they grew more concerned about its effects on the future of ‘the family.’ Brandt, A. M. (2020). No magic bullet: a social history of venereal disease in the United States since 1880 35th anniversary edition (3rd ed). Oxford university press.
- [10] "In the matter of the application of Gussie Burns for writ of Habeas Corpus." https://petitioningforfreedom.unl.edu/cases/item/hc.case.ne.1316
