Charity Girl

Originally published in the Ketchikan Daily News, March 2008; written by Lisa Pearson.

Being a happy-go-lucky kind of gal, I don’t ordinarily read books with grim plotlines, but I recently picked up Michael Lowenthal’s latest book, Charity Girl, and found it very interesting. Set in Boston during the summer of 1917, it is a story of growth and betrayal. After the sudden death of her father, 17-year old Frieda Mintz finds her relationship with her mother deteriorating. While America has recently joined the fight against the German Kaiser and the mood in the streets of Boston is optimistic, the atmosphere in Frieda’s oppressively religious home is grim. Frieda runs away and becomes a shop girl at a department store, where she is befriended by the worldly and promiscuous Lou.

Her exciting new freedom causes Frieda to engage in a passionate encounter with a young soldier who infects her with syphilis and gonorrhea. Even worse, he identifies her to an anti-vice committee as his last sexual contact. Warned by the committee to stay away from the soldier’s encampment, and fired from her job because of her ‘loose morals’, Frieda attempts to sneak into the camp to contact her beau. She is picked up by the local police and sent to a detention center for treatment of her syphilis.

While there, Frieda meets other detainees with stories even more tragic than her own. She also meets a sympathetic social worker who promises to help Frieda, but who abandons her in the end when Frieda does not accept her romantic overtures. The underage Frieda is saved from further incarceration only by the appearance of her controlling mother. The rest of her new friends are not so lucky, and the story ends badly for almost everyone involved.

The true appeal of this book is the strength and fortitude of Frieda. Her terrible ordeals actually make her a stronger person, and despite her physical and emotional scars she goes on to lead an ordinary, albeit passionless, life. The fact that this book is based on true events makes the story all the more powerful.

According to Lowenthal’s notes at the end of the book, over 30,000 women were detained during World War I in an attempt to clamp down on prostitution and the spread of venereal disease. Targeted because of their dress and behavior, only a third of these women were ever formally charged with prostitution, even though many of them were incarcerated for months. Since the topics of civil rights, profiling and due process have been in the news so much in the last few years, this book is an interesting counterpoint to current events.

This is not a fun story to read, and the descriptions of Frieda’s degrading medical treatments are uncomfortable, but the historical context of the story makes this an important book for anyone interested in civil rights, class struggles, and women’s history.