world war I internment camps

I'm reading AIDS and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag and was shocked when I read this:

The incarceration in detention camps surrounded by barbed wire during World War I of some thirty thousand American women, prostitutes and women suspected of begin prostitutes, for the avowed purpose of controlling syphilis among army recruits, caused no drop int he military's rate of infection ..." (p 81)

I had never heard of this before. I learned about the Japanese internment camps during WWII in grade school, but this was news to me.

I went to look it up online, and found this blog post, which quotes this blog post, which quotes this blog post. The blogger of that first blog post found out about it from the book Charity Girl by gay novelist Michael Lowenthal. Lowenthal first heard about the internment camps from ... a reference in AIDS and Its Metaphors. How's that for a circle of research?

Here is an interview with Lowenthal, and, even better, here is a page about the book and the process of researching it on his website. He links to some primary documents, some small things he wrote about the process of writing the book, and some history books about "the government's campaign against women during World War I":

• Making Men Moral by Nancy K. Bristow
• No Magic Bullet Allan M. Brandt
• Purity and Hygiene by David J. Pivar
• The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era by Mark Thomas Connelly
• Uneasy Virtue by Barbara Meil Hobson

He links to other books that he used in his research, which also looked interesting. These books, and Charity Girl, are going on my reading list. I'm still shocked that I've never heard about this.

p.s. This is not listed on Wikipedia's list of internment camps.