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According to a History Channel Documentary I've been watching, women who dated servicemen in the US during WWII toted a double-edged sword. On one hand there was the view they were performing a patriotic service by entertaining and comforting the troops on leave. On the other, they were looked down upon as improper women of low moral character and disparagingly dubbed (not Dub-Dubbed  ) victory girls or even, more disparagingly, patriotutes. I searched everywhere for these terms with no luck. (Dr. Bill?) They also said that in Spring of 1941 the moral prudes and religious fundamentalists gathered forces (surprise, surprise, nothing new) and managed to get The May Act passed which effectively outlawed prostitution in the US under the guise that it was feared it would spread veneral disease among the troops and render them incapable of fighting. I searched for The May Act and not one hit...strange. They then went on to say how J. Edgar Hoover received and then issued a memo immediately upon passage of the act that enabled government agents to monitor the lives of "suspect women". High among these suspect women where waitresses, a job considered beneath proper ladies, that "no good woman would have"...and there were actually sweeps where waitresses were rounded up, thousands suffered this fate, and they were accused of prostitution, incarcerated, and tested for syphilis just because they were waitresses!...there was a mention of one such sweep of 25 women in Alabama, and another of hundreds of women in Texas. (my, my, the things the history books omit for us). Anyone familiar with victory girl/patriotute or The May Act? Or these waitress sweeps? (waitress sweeps...what a ridiculous notion, huh?) Much of the material for this documentary was drawn from this woman's work: Marilyn Hegarty, "Patriots, Prostitutes, Patriotutes: The Mobilization and Control of Female Sexuality in the U.S. during World War II," 1998. Hegarty has already published an article based on her M.A. thesis, and a revised version of her dissertation is under consideration at the University of California Press. She is a Senior Lecturer at Ohio State.
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Carpal Tunnel
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W'on,
I googled ' "May Act" WWII legislation prostitution ' and got quite a few hits. This below is from the first, way down the page:
In July, at the instance of the American Social Hygiene Association, the May Act, making prostitution a Federal offense in the areas in which it was invoked, was passed by Congress. It was supported by the Surgeons General of the Army, Navy, and U.S. Public Health Service. The War Department shortly afterward issued instructions to commanders of corps areas as to the procedure for invoking the act, and a Division of Social Protection was set up in the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services in the fall to aid in the repression of commercialized prostitution by working through State and local authorities. The Army was unwilling to invoke the act, however, except as a last resort in areas where local authorities had unquestionably failed to cooperate in its program. It was sensitive to the reaction of local communities, some of which insisted that they wanted to take repressive measures themselves and wanted only the Army's moral backing. Although Charles P. Taft, Assistant Director of the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services (like the U.S. Public Health Service, under the jurisdiction of the Federal Security Administrator), apparently agreed with the Army's position, in the latter part of 1941 Drs. Thomas Parran and R. A. Vonderlehr, Surgeon General and Assistant Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service, criticized the Army in a jointly written book, "Plain Words About Venereal Disease," for its failure to invoke the May Act.
The url's long and I haven't braved trying makeashorterlink yet. But the site is the first you'd get if you googled just as I did above.
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Carpal Tunnel
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[bit of feminist rant]
well i have heard of the The May Act it forbids unmarried men and woman from sharing a hotel room, and it also makes it illegal for a woman to cross a state line in a car, when accompanied only by an man (that she is not not married or related to)...
The May Act like many laws, make the problem, the womans, (i.e., she could be arrested and prosicuted, and he would be let go. just as now days, still, prostitutes are arrested, but their 'customers' are almost never 1) arrested, or 2) prosicuted. )
Notice that waitresses where rounded up...
a classic sort of thing.. like the suggestion that woman walking out alone at night are likely to either be prostitutes or raped, and so they should be curfewed...
(and a feminist countered, "why not curfew the men?")
and in these round-ups of woman, surprize, surprize they always failed to arrest the 50 year old fat ones, and only rounded up slender woman, especial young ones, who didn't know their rights, and were easily intimidated.. then they arrested them, often forced them to "change" in to prison garb, and be given physical exams, all with no privatcy. (in otherwords, it was cops and sheriffs getting their jollies, and pretending to enforce the law)
and since the woman most often effected where poor, (and poor woman have frequently been a target for abuse) they got away with it for a while.
[/rant]
well at least you are open minded and reading about it Whit.
but i didn't know the term victory girls or patriot toots!
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Carpal Tunnel
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"Patriots, Prostitutes, Patriotutes:
Oh, sheesh!...noting the title of Hegarty's work, what sounded like patriot toot when spoken is actually, patriotute...a combination of patriot and prostitute. (d'oh!...sorry)
There's 4 citations of patriotute on Google, but no hits on OneLook (wwftd alert, tsuwm?)
May Act
Thanks, WW...I tried every combo of May Act with prostitution/US/legal/illegal/outlawed/WWII...but not legislation.
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Carpal Tunnel
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I don't remember the May Act. But I do remember "johns" being arrested in Boston.
"
Here in Boston, the story is much the same as it is elsewhere. The Boston Police Department has
just launched its sixth encore of Operation Squeeze. The procedure is simple: groups of police
officers, male and female, assume the roles of prostitutes and johns in areas where prostitution is
rampant. Once the undercover streetwalker is solicited, backup officers move in and make the
arrest Police release the names and residences of the arrested johns to the press, which sometimes
publishes them. Punishment ranges from fines and mandatory AIDS education to hours of community
service, including sweeping and cleaning the very streets those men cruised in search of sex. "
I do remember story about stripper whose defense was "Those soldiers are fighting to save American
womanhood aren't they? Well, we're showing them what they're fighting for."
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Carpal Tunnel
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I do remember story about stripper whose defense was "Those soldiers are fighting to save American
womanhood aren't they? Well, we're showing them what they're fighting for."Yes, Doctor...I believe that was Sally Rand, best-known for her famed "fan dance." http://www.dumboozle.com/sally/sallydex.html
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Joined: Jan 2001
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Carpal Tunnel
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Dear WO'N: Was Sally Rand the one who could shimmy so that one nipple circled
clockwise, while the other circled counterclockwise?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Dody taught me how to make a shorter link, so let's see whether this works: http://makeashorterlink.com/?Z2BD549B1Edit: It worked! Hooray! Another computer gizmo to add to my little bag of tricks. Thanks Dody! WW
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Carpal Tunnel
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Here in Denver we have Johns TV, where the names and mug shots of those convicted of soliciting a prostitute are shown on network tv. in Aurora, we go one step further: on our local TV channel they show the names and mug shots of those charged but not yet convicted.
We've gotten sex off the streets and into the bordellos where it belongs!
Eighteen months or so ago, we were in Myrtle Beach, SC. Peggy is a quilter and was looking for fabric stores in the local yellow pages. There weren't may fabric stores, but there were a total of about seventy five pages of ads for "escort services." According to the locals, this is because MB is a haven for geographical bachelors who flock there to play golf and then just f**k there.
TEd
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Dear WO'N: Was Sally Rand the one who could shimmy so that one nipple circled clockwise, while the other circled counterclockwise?I don't know, Dr. Bill...I wasn't there! 
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