January 25th, 2017 sex workers' rights march, San Francisco, CA
International Day of Sex Workers' Rights: 100 Years of Struggle for Sex Workers' Rights
On January 25th, 1917, over 200 sex workers stormed the Central Methodist Church in San Francisco's Tenderloin district to directly confront the Reverend Paul Smith, one of the most vocal anti-vice advocates in the city. The police force of San Francisco had made it clear: on Valentine's Day, 1917, the 1,400 women who lived and worked in the city's brothels would be evicted; prostitution would no longer be tolerated by the city government. As we've detailed in a previous blog post (which can be found by clicking here), the sex workers of San Francisco's Barbary Coast and Tenderloin districts refused to go out without a fight. While many anti-vice reformers voiced concern for the health and well-being of the city's prostitutes, they refused to advocate on behalf of these women for a basic wage or other human rights protections, instead opting to destroy their means of income in the name of social health and "progress". In response, San Francisco's sex workers organized what would become the first known sex workers' rights protest in U.S. history.
100 years later, sex workers worldwide are still fighting for basic human rights. Through their tireless organizing efforts, the concept of "decriminalization" has come to the fore as the best way to protect sex workers while eliminating sex trafficking and other non-consensual forms of sex work (see Amnesty International's statement on decriminalization and sex workers' rights: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/08/sex-workers-rights-are-human-rights/) On January 25th, 2017, Devon Angus and I coordinated with a number of sex workers' rights organizations here in San Francisco to celebrate the 100 year anniversary of this historic protest with a march and rally to the site of Paul Smith's church. Carol Queen from the Center for Sex & Culture read Reggie Gamble's speech from 1917, while representatives from the Erotic Service Provider's Union, Sex Worker's Outreach Project, and US PROStitute's Collective read a new manifesto for sex workers' rights in the 21st century. While working on Alice, it was quickly apparent to Devon and myself that while our primary job was as researchers and authors, we could not help but also become political advocates for sex workers today.
January 25, 1917, San Francisco, CA
The problems that Alice Smith addressed in her memoir have yet to be solved; sex workers today are demanding the same basic protections that they were in 1913, and they will continue to fight tirelessly for these protections. All humans deserve basic health services free from stigmatization. All humans deserve safety from police harassment. All humans deserve to be able to turn to the law for protection from rape and abuse. All humans deserve access to a basic living wage. All humans deserve to live freely as whatever gender they prefer without judgement and harassment. All humans deserve a say in how their bodies and their livelihoods are regulated. And it is my opinion that humans who make a living off of erotic services in a consensual and non-violent manner deserve to live a life free of fear, free from fear of incarceration, the fear of social stigmatization, free from the fear of violence that sex workers disproportionately face. If we aim to be decent feminists, if we aim to be decent humans , then we must ally ourselves with sex workers' in their struggle for basic human rights. And we must allow sex workers to create the terms upon which this movement is built. Today is the International Day of Sex Workers' Rights, but this battle will continue all day, every day, until the needs of sex workers are met worldwide.
-Ivy Anderson, March 3rd, 2017
Alice and the 1917 Sex Worker Rights March
Reposted from the California Historical Society Blog, which you can check out by clicking here.
The Centennial of the 1917 San Francisco Sex Worker Rights March
Bv Devon Angus
In 1917, San Franciscans faced a full plate of political drama and struggle. The Preparedness Day Bombing in the city the previous year, an event that extreme elements of the Chamber of Commerce exploited to attack organized labor, had been both a premonition of America’s forthcoming involvement in the Great War and the death knell of radical labor in the city. Within the greater struggle, a courageous and desperate political action was staged by a group of women who were considered to be voiceless and worthless of consideration: the sex workers of San Francisco’s vice districts. Women had been in the vanguard of political action in the state of California for decades; amongst the first to win the right to vote in the nation in 1911, women’s political groups in the Golden State had a considerable voice in the politics of the era. While club women, often from the middle to upper middle classes, sought to purge the urban landscape of the city’s riotous gold rush past, working class women and sex workers struggled to exist in a world that built wall after wall against any protest they hoped to present.
Long illegal and yet long sanctioned, prostitution and the brothel system were foundational pieces of the mythic West. Tidal in nature, waves of reform and vigilantism dashed against the bulwarks of the vice districts of San Francisco with only temporary successes. The passage of the Red Light Abatement Act in 1913, fully enacted in 1917, broke that stormwall, closing down the infamous vice districts of San Francisco that had grown up with the gold rush city. Anti-vice organizers mounted a rally in January 1917 that they dubbed “Purity Sunday”, weeks before the mass evictions of the vice districts on Valentine’s Day, focused on the moral questions surrounding sex work. “Victims” of the brothel system were to be “saved”, if possible. But what eluded these varied reformers in their campaign was the labor aspect of sex work.
Reggie Gamble and Maude Spencer, two madams from the Uptown Tenderloin district, aimed to confront “Purity Sunday” by storming the church of one of its main prothesizers, the Rev. Paul Smith. Seeking organizational support from Fremont Older, the editor of the San Francisco Bulletin, a rival to the anti-vice Examiner, Gamble and Spencer planned what would become the first major organized sex worker protest in U.S. history. In 1913, Older had published the memoirs of a sex worker who went by “Alice Smith” as a serial in the Bulletin. The response to the memoir was extraordinary; over 4,000 letters flooded into the paper, many by sex workers themselves. In all, 114 letters to the editor were published by sex workers, speaking candidly about issues they faced that had long went unheard. By 1917 Older, alarmed by the attacks on organized labor in the aftermath of the 1916 Preparedness Day Bombing, had turned the energy of his editor’s pen against the city’s rightward turn. Likewise, with the planned march organized by Gamble and Spencer, Older sought to tie in the sex worker movement with the beleaguered labor movement.
Reggie Gamble stormed the pulpit of the Rev. Smith after leading over 200 sex workers into the church; her speech focused on the economic conditions that surrounded sex workers. The ongoing wage that a working class woman could expect at the time was six dollars a week, which was little more than starvation wages. Needless to say, working class men made considerably more. Facing such economic disparity, especially with children, out of work husbands, or parents to support, many women turned to prostitution simply in order to survive. Others chose sex work as a valid economic choice in a city with few options. Anti-vice reformers, claimed Gamble, entirely missed the point, as she told the congregation:
“You want the city cleaned up around your church--but where do you want the women to go? Have you made any arrangement by which they can make their living elsewhere? …Why don’t you go to the big business houses? Why don’t you go to the legislature and change the conditions? Men here in San Francisco say they want to eradicate vice. If they do, they better give up something of their dividends and pay the girls’ wages so they can live. You won’t do anything to stop vice by driving us women out of the city to some other city. Has your city and your church a different God, that you drive evil away from your city and your church to other cities and other churches? If you want to stop prostitution, stop the new girls from coming in here. They are coming into it every day. They will always be coming into it as long as conditions, wages and education are as they are. You don’t do any good by attacking us. Why don’t you attack those conditions?”
Come join in the celebration of the 100 year anniversary of this important piece of feminist and labor history at the Tenderloin Museum on January 25th, followed by a march to the site of the original 1917 demonstration. You can RSVP at this link: https://www.facebook.com/events/1810284865925747/
Photo: City Lights Bookstore in the 1950's; sourced from foundsf.org
Alice Has Arrived!
Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute has officially been released! You can purchase it online here, or at any of the following retailers nationwide. If you don't see your local bookstore on the list, do encourage them to order a copy (or two!) direct from Heyday Books.
California:
Northtown Books, Arcata
Bookshop Benicia, Benicia
Moe's Books, Berkeley
Mrs. Dalloway's, Berkeley
Pandora Books, Berkeley
Book Passage, Corta Madera
UC Davis Bookstore, Davis
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
Gallery Bookshop and Bookwinkel's, Mendocino
Museum of the American Indian, Novato
Orinda Books, Orinda
Bell's Bookstore, Palo Alto
Vroman's Bookstore, Pasadena
Towne Center Books, Pleasanton
Point Reyes Books, Point Reyes Station
Adobe Books, San Francisco
Alley Cat Books, San Francisco
Books Inc., San Francisco
City Lights Books, San Francisco
Dog Eared Books, San Francisco
Green Apple Books, San Francisco
Russian Hill Bookstore, San Francisco
Thidwick Books, San Francisco
Chaucer's Bookstore, Santa Barbara
Bookshop Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz
Logos Books and Records, Santa Cruz
Diesel Books, Santa Monica
Copperfield's Books, Sebastopol
Book Loft, Solvang
Mountain Bookshop, Sonora
Stinson Beach Books, Stinson Beach
Mendocino Book Company, Ukiah
Community Memorial Museum, Yuba City
Colorado:
Between the Covers, Telluride
Boulder Bookstore, Boulder
Tattered Cover, Denver
Oregon:
Powell's Books, Portland
Washington:
Elliot Bay Book Company, Seattle
Odyssey Bookshop, Port Angeles
Nationwide:
Barnes and Noble
...with many more to be announced!
"Jeane Hariot" recalls her time working as a brothel pianist, revealing many aspects of the shared experience between working class women and sex workers.
Immediately following the announcement of Alice Smith's story in the San Francisco Bulletin, a flurry of letters to the editor poured in before the first installment of a "A Voice from the Underworld" even ran. Eventually over 4,000 letters were sent into the paper, with nearly 300 of them published alongside the serialized memoir. Clubwomen, clergymen, bankers, laborers, anarchists, house wives, philosophers, vigilantes, and social scientists all wrote in to the paper, eager to give their two cents on the "prostitution problem" that had riveted the Golden State. What made the Bulletin stand out from its rival papers was the inclusion of the voices of sex workers in the letters to the editor; all in all nearly half were written by sex workers or working class women who were contemplating sex work. While we were only able to publish twelve of the letters in Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute, we long planned to publish online the letters that we were unable to include in the manuscript.
The following text comes from a brothel piano player. Jeane Heriot, as she calls herself, reveals in her letter some common linkages between sex workers in the brothel system and working class women who were employed in non-sex work jobs in vice districts like San Francisco's Barbary Coast. For a woman, simply working in a brothel, regardless of the work itself, created enough of a societal stigma to deem her as "fallen" as the sex workers themselves. Her struggles to find work, leading to her "downfall" as a brothel musician, echo Alice Smith and so many of the letter writers who called for economic justice for working class, single women. The reliance on a husband to merely survive economically was a constant concern for those who wrote into the Bulletin; anarchist Emma Goldman, who gave a speech on "A Voice from the Underworld" in San Francisco in 1913, gave voice to their sentiment when she questioned whether marriage for convenience was nothing more than another form of prostitution.
June 18th, 1913
Editor Bulletin: I am glad that we are about to hear from the lower strata, as the world terms it, for 99 per cent of the inmates of “sporting” houses are there by the act of “someone.” I can speak (but do not want my name made public). Most of the girls are wives, sweethearts or widows of some creature misnamed “man.” Circumstances compelled me, who had no knowledge of hard labor (being a book-keeper) to play piano in one of the red light houses for two summer seasons, and the stigma spoiled my whole life thereafter. The first time I went to fill an engagement the horror of the idea compelled me to leave on the morning of the third day, but being desperately in need it was either do that or suicide; so, the following year, after efforts to procure employment, I was glad to go once more. I met my husband there, married him, for my life was made a hell on account of where I met him, although I became a hard working woman and toiled early and late to fulfill the arduous duties of a rural life.
I am now an old woman, and I pity all those who had only two alternatives, suicide or red light, or bear abuse and neglect.
I knew a wife of a real estate man of this city who said the only good time she ever had in her life was after becoming a “sporting” woman. Her husband neglected his home and beautiful children for his stenographer affinity. Until nearly distracted, the wife went astray to feed her children. Afterward she put them in a school and had a house herself.
Another married woman who was abused by her husband tried, like myself, “most everything.” We even thought of going to pick hops. Then finally she drifted to Nome, where I lost track of her—and she was a good woman. We both tried so hard.
I am a subscriber to the Bulletin, but will only give a nom de plume. Yours faithfully,
Jeane Heriot
Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library. Mugshots of "Sex Crimes and Muzzlers" from San Francisco, 1918.
Alma Greene, a 21 year old sex worker from San Francisco, writes into the San Francisco Bulletin in 1913
Immediately following the announcement of Alice Smith's story in the San Francisco Bulletin, a flurry of letters to the editor poured in before the first installment of a "A Voice from the Underworld" even ran. Eventually over 4,000 letters were sent into the paper, with nearly 300 of them published alongside the serialized memoir. Clubwomen, clergymen, bankers, laborers, anarchists, house wives, philosophers, vigilantes, and social scientists all wrote in to the paper, eager to give their two cents on the "prostitution problem" that had riveted the Golden State. What made the Bulletin stand out from its rival papers was the inclusion of the voices of sex workers in the letters to the editor; all in all nearly half were written by sex workers or working class women who were contemplating sex work. While we were only able to publish twelve of the letters in Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute, we long planned to publish online the letters that we were unable to include in the manuscript.
The following letter is from a remarkable woman who wrote several times into the paper, becoming one of the more controversial voices of the entire series. Alma Greene, a 21 year old sex worker in San Francisco, roiled the readership of the Bulletin by refusing offers of charity and assistance. The dominant narrative at the time (one still prevalent today) was that prostitutes and dance hall girls were victims of the criminal underworld kept alive through police graft. Recently empowered clubwomen, who had flexed their political clout during the fight over the Red Light Abatement Act, wrote into the paper with offers of help for their "poor red sisters." Alma Greene upset the "victim" narrative by claiming full agency for herself and her choices, spurning the offers of the clubwomen. This stood in stark contrast to other voices of sex workers published by the paper, such as Babe of Bartlett Alley who wrote into the paper pleading for assistance, arguing that Alma Greene's stance was damaging to sex workers in the long run. We shall explore Babe's story, and her relationship with the Bulletin and its staff, more fully in upcoming blogs.
Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute includes one of Alma's letters. We plan on printing all of them eventually; here is one of them.
Alma Greene Describes Incidents in Her Life
June 26th, 1913
Mr. Fremont Older—The letters you are receiving as a result of Alice Smith’s story are the greatest human document I have ever seen, and the story itself, I am sure will be even greater as a picture of our phase of human life. I have a book of proverbs which I like to read from when I am tired because there is so much wisdom in so few words. The weakness in writing and speaking is too many words. We think a thought in one second, but in expressing it we are clumsy. One proverb, in particular, has helped me a lot. It is to the effect that what we see in others is a reflection of ourselves. I have pondered that a great deal. I wonder how many others will ponder it, or have? It has softened my outlook and made me think. I am daily learning that it is true. If we see good in others, no matter whom, we are good accordingly; if we see bad in others, no matter its nature, we are accordingly bad. Isn’t that true?
Several nights ago a clean-cut young fellow came into this house. He was a Gibson type. His clothes were tailor made and he was educated, gentlemanly and considerate. So many men come here who think they own a girl’s soul if they spend $5 for drinks.
Ordinarily I would have exerted myself to “get him,” but I was all upset—I was thinking of your proposed story. I don’t really know why it should affect me so deeply, but it has.
The young fellow had lots of money, and money is our God, just the same as it is the God of everyone else. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to enter the fray. His suit was grey, as were his eyes. His hair was fluffy—evidently just from the hands of a barber—and he was genial. He had all the characteristics of an “easy mark.” In the common language of this life he was a “swell kid.”
For two hours we danced for him while he bought the wine, and threw dollars on the polished floor. Other parties came in, and vanished—upstairs, or down—but I remained in the parlor. I was interested in studying him. Finally, after a whispered conference and a quick kiss, one of the girls assisted him from the room with his straw hat in her hand.
The next afternoon she showed me a $50 gold note and informed me that he was a bank cashier from ____, well, of course, I cannot name the place—a small Southern California city. She also told me something that shocked me—used as I am to such things. After he had gone to sleep she had searched his pockets because he had been so reticent and she was curious to learn who he was. What she learned was that he was a married man and that his wife was enceinte. A letter he had received that morning contained the information.
What is the answer? Is it that someone told him of this house while he was semi-intoxicated and therefore semi-responsible? I don’t know, because I know so-called respectable men who come here sober and refuse to take a drink, though they treat all hands repeatedly before going upstairs. Most men like to talk, like to boast, like to show their cards to impress one with their standing. Lots of bank clerks become “cashiers” and even “presidents” when they are here. I recall one young fellow who was working as a bookkeeper for a coal yard. He told us he was private secretary to the Mayor, and thought we believed it. He is now “doing time,” poor youth.
But quite a number of prominent men do come here. It is really surprising how many of them apparently like to make confidantes of shadows, and almost invariably a shrug of incredulousness brings documentary proof in the shape of cards, letters or a check book. A check book!—maybe that doesn’t look good! It means that a little extra “sweetness” to this particular visitor may result in a rest for a few days—a furlough from disgrace.
At this moment I have four steady “friends,” each of whom is prominent professionally. Each one thinks he has made a “hit.” Each one trusts me, and yet each one has falsified. Each one has offered to “take me out of this life,” but I have declined the offers. Why? Because experience and the comparing of notes with other girls has made me “wise.” In other words, I am not gullible. Few men are themselves—intellectually—while in this atmosphere. They may be themselves, in character, however.
I have established that two of my four “steadies” are married, one with children. Another is betrothed to a “local beauty.” The other is still an enigma, but I shall—to use a vulgarism—get his number eventually. Why shouldn’t I do so? He got mine the moment he saw me. I have as much right to know what he is as he has to know what I am.
One Sunday last year I went to church. I got up that day feeling blue, and was consumed with a desire to revert to my childhood. I entered the first church I came to, but I didn’t remain for the benediction. Instead of keeping my eyes on the preacher I permitted them to rove, and they discovered two men in the congregation—both of whom buried bowed their heads during the prayer—whom I had seen in our reception parlor, one of them in our dance parlor several times. Until that moment I had refused to believe what the other girls had tried to tell me—that men from all walks of life were alike. Now I know for myself. Do you blame me for being dubious about what will be accomplished by the Alice Smith story? To tell the truth, I feel the uselessness of thinking. If the world only knew men as they are, and women also, we should fold our tents and silently steal away. I’ve forgotten which poet wrote that, I have read so many. He may have gotten the idea in a bagnio, who knows? Poets have gotten ideas amid such surroundings, and poets will. I am not cynical, but truth is truth.
All this is preliminary to what I started to write. Despite the fact that I am skeptical as to the good the Underworld story will accomplish, I feel that so long as it is being published it should cover every possible angle of the subject so far as that is possible. I have only been in the life sixteen months. I know a little, just as many other girls who have written to you indicate that they know a little. It is only that the little I know may help to get the subject before the public that I am moved to write. Instead of writing this letter I could have taken a spin through the park—as a chattel. It is good to get out in the sun and air, but I feel free at this moment, free in soul and body. That also is good. It is the greatest goodness in the world.
But it is now time to take my piano practice. My maid is French and is teaching me that language. I also take painting lessons. You perhaps wonder why. I’ll tell you:
Quite often a girl in this house gets an “offer” to accompany some rich “guy” to Europe. The more accomplished a girl is, the better her chances for such an offer. It means comparative furlough from promiscuousness, a chance to see the world, and “good money” without effort. Only the other day a girl came back from New York, whence she had gone with a local business man as his “wife.” The five weeks trip netted her nearly $1000. But she refers to the man now in language unfit to use. She was his slave for five weeks and had to pretend to like him when he was positively repulsive. There is one advantage in remaining “at home.” It is that you can refuse. I shall write to you again; in fact, many times, so long as you may wish it.
It is interesting to hear the comments in this house about “Alma Greene’s letters.” Of course, that is not my name. No one in this part of the country knows my name, and my name here is much more poetical than
Alma Green.
Fremont Older, 1919
Why the San Francisco Bulletin published Alice Smith's memoirs, "A Voice From the Underworld"
Shortly after Alice's memoirs were first announced, the Bulletin presented their reasons for running "A Voice from the Underworld." Unlike other editorials about "the prostitution problem" that ran in competing San Francisco papers like the Examiner and the Chronicle, the Bulletin, under the editorship of Fremont Older, stressed the importance of asking sex workers themselves their opinions about upcoming legislation that would so sharply affect their lives. It was an approach that was controversial, yet central to the purposes of the paper.
June 21st, 1913.
The Life of a San Francisco Outcast Woman to Be Published by The Bulletin as a Step Toward Solving Problem Raised by the Red Light Abatement Bill.
In answer to what The Bulletin and its friends have ascertained is a wide-spread demand, this paper is about to commence publication of a serial fact-story of remarkable interest, entitled, “A Voice from the Underworld.”
The writer, who uses the pseudonym of Alice Smith, has led for the past six years the life of a prostitute in San Francisco.
The deep concern felt throughout California in the problems of prostitution has borne fruit of late in two legislative enactments. One is the so-called Red Light Abatement law, aimed at the abolition of houses of ill-fame. The other is an appropriation of $50,000 to found a refuge home for the unfortunate woman thus set adrift.
Our legislators did not consult the women of the underworld. The women themselves must speak. They must tell their side freely and fully, and their words must be weighed and studied. Otherwise our best efforts are but experiments.
The State Legislature had struck at one form of vice, wholly ignorant as to whether the alternative is a worse form of vice. It would build a refuge for women, without knowing in the least whether women will flee to that refuge.
The Legislature is in the position of a doctor who gives his patient a pill without asking a question of the sufferer. The pill might do nothing, or it might cure, or it might kill, or it might stop one sickness and start another. The sensible doctor would first learn the patient’s symptoms at first-hand.
Widespread Demand
The demand for a sincere and complete revelation of the life of the half-world comes from many sources. All over America and Europe today prostitution is a moot problem. Lawmakers, humanitarians, women’s clubs, scientists, religionists, educators, the general public, are inquiring, “Why this sore spot in our society? What is prostitution? Is it necessary? Is it curable?”
Many roads have been explored in search of the answer. The theorists have tried their way. The official investigators of the Rockefeller Institute and of New York and Chicago have tried theirs. The theorists have failed; and there is just a suspicion that certain investigators were mainly anxious to scrape the muck from the boots of the nation’s wage-payers and employers.
To give the truth about prostitution and the life and character of the prostitute, to supply this knowledge so necessary yet so strangely neglected, is the immediate object of The Bulletin in printing this story, “A Voice From the Underworld.”
Still Greater Purpose
The Bulletin has yet a greater purpose. This paper, as no other journal in the United States, has held to the ideal of pleading the cause of the outcast and downtrodden. In these columns, with their wide circulation and varied classes of readers, many powerful tales of human experience have been printed—experience of the condemned people, oppressed people, ostracized people, the people against whom a ban has been pronounced by those who do not understand.
Thoughtful readers of these Bulletin serials have added much to their own breadth of mind and grasp of life. Donald Lowrie’s great story, “My Life in Prison,” so marvelously changed people’s attitude toward ex-prisoners that the change deserves to be called a revolution. Abraham Ruef’s exposure of political graft taught thousands of voters exactly what they had escaped from, and clinched them in their purpose to keep our government clean. Maurice de Martini’s “Life Story of an Adventurer” clearly showed that in our efforts to remove the deeper causes underlying crime, we must not neglect that more superficial problem, the corruption of our police.
All these stories, each in its degree, brought home to the Bulletin’s readers the great truth—the truth so easily forgotten by those who do not understand—that all men are brothers; made of the same stuff, ruled by the same desires, equally moulded as clay under pressure of environment; despite all seeming differences, good or bad, still the same humanity.
This truth—the truth of determinism—is the truth of Christ. Learning it, men cease to understand other men, but open the doors to them and extend to them the eager hands of help.
In this spirit the Bulletin has printed these life-stories; and in this spirit it is about to print “A Voice From the Underworld.” Only occasionally do the sufferers of the world find a voice; when such a spokesman is found, able to tell in living words the things she knows, the record is of value. Such a voice is Alice Smith.
In certain of its features, her story is typical. Through just such successions of petty circumstances many another woman must have come who is now among the shadows. The less typical, purely personal incidents give her narrative that strange interest which we all feel in one another’s daily lives.
The earlier years of the life of Alice Smith, her early home, her innocent young ideals, will forcibly recall to many a happy wife the circumstances of her youth. Later portions will illuminate to many a mother the pitfalls amid which her daughter now wanders. The remainder will be a plain portrayal of the life of the underworld.
At the close, if the reader has not suffered a change, has not replaced condemnation with pity, and disgust with sorrow, the Bulletin will have failed. But it will not fail. Irresistibly the life of this modern Hester Prynne was shaped by petty circumstances toward one tragic goal. Chance, accident, character, family, poverty, prudish responsibility, all played their part in her life, as in the lives of us all.
From Spider Kelly's on the Barbary Coast in 1911. Source: www.foundsf.org
This blog is coming very soon...
...and will be regularly updated with posts regarding sex and gender from the turn of the 20th century to today, feminist, labor, and sex worker's rights movements, the history of journalism and sensationalism in the U.S., and the history of sex work in urban centers in the U.S.
You can also check back here to find a selection of letters written into the Bulletin in response to "A Voice from the Underworld" that we were not able to include in Alice. Up until now these fascinating and varied letters, from politicians, clergymen, sex workers, anarchists, women's rights organizers, scullery maids, philosophers and more, have yet to be seen in print since 1913.
You can sign up for our email list here in order to get regular blog updates.
- i. and d.