Charity Girl by Michael Lowenthal

Charity Girl by Michael Lowenthal

During World War I, seventeen-year-old Frieda Mintz secures a job at a Boston department store and strikes out on her own, escaping her repressive Jewish mother and marriage to a wealthy widower twice her age. Determined to find love on her own terms, she is intoxicated by her newfound freedom and the patriotic fervor of the day. That is, until a soldier reports her as his last sexual contact, sweeping her up in the government's wartime crusade against venereal disease. Quarantined in a detention center, Frieda finds in the Home's confines a group of brash, unforgettable women who help her see the way to a new kind of independence.

Charity Girl is based on a little-known chapter in American history that saw fifteen thousand women across the nation incarcerated. Like When the Emperor Was Divine, Lowenthal's poignant, provocative novel will leave readers moved - and astonished by the shameful facts that inspired it.

MICHAEL LOWENTHAL is the bestselling author of Charity Girl, Avoidance, and The Same Embrace, among other works. He's written for a variety of publications, including the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book World, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and others. In Boston College and Lesely University, he teaches writing. Charity Girl was inspired by a phrase in Susan Sontag's AIDS and Its Metaphors, in which she compares the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII to the confinement of American women during WWI. Lowenthal explains, I had heard of the second historical occurrence, but not the first.