Rent Charity Girl

Synopsis

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 governments wartime crusade against venereal disease. Deemed a threat to the country and quarantined in a detention center, Frieda finds in the Homes confines a group of brash, unforgettable women who help her see the way to a new kind of independence. Charity Girl is based on an ugly, little-known chapter in American history that saw fifteen thousand women across the nation incarcerated. Like When the Emperor Was Divine, Lowenthals novel is poignant, provocative historical fiction that will leave readers moved and astonished by the shameful facts that inspired it.

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