 Thank you We just really want to extend our gratitude first and foremost to the San Francisco Public Library And to all the archivists here who we worked with as well This is actually where our story begins interestingly enough and We're gonna we're gonna take you over the next hour essentially through the narrative of how we discovered this document the many sort of research Roads that this project took us down over the course of discovering Alice Smith's memoir and And hopefully you get a pretty well-rounded picture of sort of the history of this story And we definitely welcome questions afterwards But yeah, as I mentioned it was it was a little over four years ago that Devon and I were Hulled up here behind a microfilm reader at the San Francisco main library on the fifth floor and We discovered the memoir of Alice Smith published in 1913 by a newspaper called the San Francisco bulletin and Her story was titled a voice from the underworld so you can see the opening installment here on the screen At the time we knew very little about this piece What we did know is that it was one of the first serialized memoirs published by Fremont older Who is the fascinating editor of the bulletin who began his career as a vitriolic crusader? But later became an emphatic advocate for social justice. We knew that older himself And later biographers connected his publication of a voice from the underworld to a later protest Which was organized by a group of prostitutes in 1917 and we knew that this was likely the first sex workers rights protest in modern US history But what we did not know when we discovered this document and what we could not easily find was anything about who this Alice Smith was Well, who was this woman? Why was she writing her story? And for that matter why did the bulletin publish her memoir was her story meant to inspire fear titillation pity perhaps or maybe compassion and Did Alice Smith even exist or was this just some political maneuver orchestrated by the paper to boost sales? And engage in the white slavery debate that had taken the nation's media by storm and that will get into a little bit later on in this presentation What motivated the bulletin a leading newspaper in an ever-growing metropolis to publish near this memoir? First of all, but also nearly 300 letters written by other sex workers and working-class women telling their own wide-ranging stories Over the course of our research We paid attention to today's newspapers and to the changing face of San Francisco amidst the second coming of the tech industry We witnessed the shuttering and attempted cleanup of many of the city's centers of vice You may know the tenderloin is now being rebranded as Union Square West Obviously the nude men in the Castro have to cover their bits with decency sheaths and The pot smoking runaways on Hates Street are being arrested for sitting on the sidewalks We watched many of our working-class friends get pushed out of the city over the course of working on this project and faced our own eviction Troubles and as San Francisco changed before our eyes We cannot help but recall our research and notice similarities to 1913 when Alice Smith's memoir was published The post-earthquake booster ism of real estate after the 1906 earthquake the cleanup efforts before the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition The eventual closure of the dance halls brothels and gambling dens of the Barbary Coast in 1917 all sounded strikingly familiar We also noticed a burgeoning discussion about feminism sex work and sex workers rights happening on a global scale today in 2015 Amnesty International Adopted a controversial policy goal of decriminalizing consensual sex work worldwide This policy spurred a media blitz and suddenly op-eds written by current and former sex workers were appearing in major papers Like the New York Times the Washington Post and Guardian UK We could not help but notice a number of striking similarities to a voice from the underworld in 1913 and today politicians religious groups anti-trafficking activists Celebrities and feminists all have had an enormous hand in shaping the way we think about sex work But how many of us have actually heard from sex workers themselves? Both in the bulletin in 1913 and today sex workers are demanding to be heard and to be taken seriously and to be given agency Over their own lives, and that's really the key of this whole work It seems that in 1913 Fremont older the editor of the bulletin genuinely Attempted to help the situation by opening the pages of his daily paper as a public forum for equitable debate And for once the opinions of prostitutes were published alongside those of prominent politicians and clergymen What that story we're gonna tell you today is sort of about how this story came to be and what Alice's memoir meant for San Francisco, which at the time was really a city in flux and We hope that each of you are able to quiet your own preconceived notions about sex work for the next hour and perhaps Our grand hope is that this presentation will give you some food for thought sort of about the greater spirit of San Francisco What the sort of cultural soul of this place is Whether San Francisco is a sanctuary for social leniency and social justice Or if it's an imperial center of global wealth and power and how these two different Conceptions of San Francisco have swung back and forth over time and what that actually means for the residents of this city So we're gonna Start off the the story of the publication of Alice Smith's memoirs really begins during the gold rush As so much does with the history of San Francisco And it really begins with two different newspaper editors So a lot of our story is told through the newspapers and through San Francisco is fascinating and Very dramatic history of the newspapers The first editor James King of William He was a vigilante newspaper man who hoped to clean up the shanty town metropolis of San Francisco during the tumultuous 1850s his paper the San Francisco evening bulletin Was his platform where according to one historian he flayed the politicians the prostitutes the gamblers the toughs the police And just about everything in sight while championing the home the church the school and reform The gold rush San Francisco due to its geographic isolation held in its infancy a very relaxed sense of morals to say the least Gambling and prostitution were widespread and accepted in a city where men outnumbered women 50 to 1 with this gender imbalance in 1849 prostitutes ended up serving an Interesting and important social function within this male-dominated world Now throughout during this time there's something that in academia call Jacksonian gender roles, but really what this is is From about the 1830s on There's a real clear delineation between the roles of the genders women and men sit were considered to be biologically different Psychologically different Men were supposed to function in the public sphere and them in the public sphere They they controlled the world of economics politics, but they are also passionate and sexual to a fault and they needed to be curved and controlled by women and these would be so-called proper women this would be women who were asexual by nature they Controlled the domestic sphere the sphere of morality religion the home now these women didn't come out to early San Francisco in the beginning the women that did come out were for the most part prostitutes and The social codes dictated that men in a public in the public sphere as Controllers on the public stage for San Francisco has always been a very public city They needed women to to to fulfill this this this this role and for a time prostitutes and madams were accepted in society because there wasn't an alternative and and they Could acquire a considerable amount of social status and certainly money They also broke a lot of rules in a way because they were acting in the economic in the economic sphere Which is the sphere of men? And they also were not championing the home. So when so-called proper women Started to come out in in in the early 1850s more and more this imbalance was restored and prostitutes were relegated into vice districts most notably the Barbary Coast which was got its name in the 1860s from infamous North African coastline known for for its piracy James King of William the crusading editor who sought to clean up the city was gunned down in 1856 His death helped spark the infamous vigilance committee of 1856 Which resulted in public lynchings and open insurrection in the name of law and order Vice and civic corruption would go hand-in-glove in the minds of future reformers and vigilantes including Fremont older who took over the reins of the bulletin in 1895 he started out as a Vigilante and a real law-and-order newspaper man Though he would in time become one of one of the great fighters for the those without a voice He became quite radical as we'll see But he originally wanted to use the Bolton as a tool of vigilantism He wanted to follow what James King of William was doing. He wanted to go after corruption Corruption and vice as he believed went hand-in-glove and you had to clean up vice in the city if you wanted to clean up civic corruption He attacked this with a certain religious fervor and the person who he really went after is a man by the name of Abraham Roof This is a famous the graph trials of the first decade of the of the 20th century The publication of Alice Smith's memoirs actually really goes right back to Abraham Roof We can't go too much into this whole story, which is a fascinating one, but The corrupt political boss in the overzealous editor clashed throughout this decade and Fremont older very much wanted to put Abraham Roof in prison. He was a political boss. He pulled the strings of the mayor at the time Mayor Schmitz But the editor by 1910 started to have serious doubts about this crusade trying to go after a roof and he felt that if he say cut the head off of this of That the body would wither that this man was responsible for the corruption And he didn't realize or he started to realize that there was a lot of corruption a lot of corruption in a lot of places Getting rid of this one guy wasn't gonna do it So he started going after other people Including some of the business elite in the city and this would didn't go over very well with with the business elite in the end Abraham Roof was sent to San Quentin and Fremont older started really being disturbed by this crusade of his so he Went over across the bay to San Quentin and was shocked by the inhumane conditions He was truly truly shocked The next day he's on the paper. He says mercy for Abraham Roof He wants roof out of prison who he just spent nine years putting in prison People thought he was insane a lot of people really thought he was insane Teddy Roosevelt Yeah, Teddy Roosevelt was a big player in this and and a friend in ways or They knew each other at least a free mon olders Teddy Roosevelt wasn't happy with this at all Fremont older new people were confused And so he wanted to get his point out and I want to read you just a little bit of a speech that he gave explaining why and this this really comes all the way back to why he published this memoir of Alice Smith I Have asked for mercy for roof because I felt that I ball above all others had done most to bring about his downfall At last after eight years of a manhunting and man-hating debauch Roof crossed over and became what I wanted him to be a convict stripped of his citizenship Stripped of everything society values except the remnant of an ill-gotten fortune It is then I said to myself. I have got him. He is in stripes He's in a cell his head is shaved. He is in tears He is helpless beaten chained killed as far as his old life is concerned. You have won How do you like your victory? My soul revolted. I Saw myself also stripped that is stripped of all pretense sham self-righteousness holding the key to another man's cell I dropped the key. I never want to hold it again Let it be taken up and held by those who feel they're justified in holding it. I want no more jail keys and This really began a part an episode It was a profound shift in Fremont Older's life where he decided instead of becoming a Vigilante newspaper man that was trying to destroy Corruption instead it's like a prosecutor if you can think about it like something like a prosecutor to becoming something of a public defender and He decided to give a voice and to try to protect people that that didn't have a voice in society And this was a huge shift that same year While he was visiting Roof in prison He met a man named Donald Lowry now Fremont Older gave Abraham Roof a platform and asked him Would you write your memoirs to be serialized in the bulletin to explain your position? This is the best way that I can defend you is to let your words get out and he did It was called the road I traveled It was Pretty successful though people were still pretty weirded out by by older defending this man that he Essentially, you know was one of the people that put him in prison But he had a considerable more success with this next memoir serialized memoir that he decided to publish which was a memoir by a man named Donald Lowry Donald Lowry was a prisoner who Was trying to smuggle out his memoir of life in San Quentin including Hort the tortures that were that were being perpetrated at the prison He would face a huge huge He probably wouldn't have ever gotten out of prison had those memoirs been smuggled out, but caught it had even caught So he was very scared about this because he was gonna get out in a few years Fremont Older Was fascinated by him Fremont Older still had quite a lot of political power and he actually had him He had him paroled under his wing gave him a job on the newspaper and asked if he could publish those memoirs in his paper My life in prison became an important book and it did that book the publication of it ended torture in both Sing Sing in New York and San Quentin and Folsom prison in California and Prison historians of prison and prison reform have pointed to Donald Lowry's book as one of the foundational works of The prison reform movement Fremont Older was part of this. He also was wanted to continue this this project and When The red light abatement law, which we're gonna talk about in a moment came up the idea of publishing The memoir of a prostitute became very important and Alice Smith and Fremont Older met Yeah, so By the time Fremont Older prepared to publish Alice Smith's story women had entered a new era of political Engagement in San Francisco and nationwide really in 1911 California voters approved a suffrage bill Which is nine years before the 19th amendment made it legal for women to vote nationwide and The enfranchisement of women indicates obviously a major shift in how gender roles were defined as we mentioned You know for many decades there had been these sort of solidified ideals of women as the defenders of the home these sort of asexual moral rulers of the private sphere men as being naturally the violent and sexual and Social and therefore prepared to engage in the sort of muddied world of politics and finance Which were considered far too sordid for Gentle feminine sensibilities as they were seen at the time But the second you have suffrage pass and women engaging in the public sphere politically these notions sort of start to crumble of course Now it's not a coincidence that these suffrage movements coincided with these sort of These these national scandals of civic corruption like these graph trials with a brief that Devin was talking about But also corruption scandals at in Tammany Hall in New York City The these scandals really connected in the minds of Americans concepts of political deviancy being connected to vice crime and criminality and there was a strong desire to sort of clean up Politics nationwide and there was a sense that women who now were politically enfranchised and who were was still considered to be by nature moral Had the natural capacity to reform the the sordid world of American politics And rather than outright rejecting these gendered notions that had forced them to remain within the private sphere of the home for so long Many women argued that yes, they could bring morality and righteousness to this depraved world of politics And and so while implicitly agreeing with gendered notions that were still rooted in misogyny Suffragettes were able to win the vote and thus enter the public sphere in a legitimized way And immediately upon enfranchisement California's largest women's clubs began campaigning to pass a number of statewide reforms The California Federation of Women's Clubs, which was the largest largest group of organized women quickly agreed upon a legislative Platform that included new testing standards for dairy products the creation of maternity homes joint guardianship over children But the main law that really galvanized this new women's movement was called the red light abatement and An injunction act and the goal of the red light abatement act was to close the state's brothels By attacking those that profited off prostitution namely the property owners of houses of ill-fame or brothels And though prostitution was already technically illegal in most places across the state through various, you know City or countywide laws that had been passed it still existed often in these sort of you know Segregated districts that police and politicians would turn a blind eye to These segregated districts were sort of considered a necessary evil a forced society a place where Men's lusts could be siphoned into and away from so-called decent women and And actually there's an interesting There's an interesting anecdote analysis story where she she arrives in a new small mining town here in California and Wants to find the red light district and asks a local police officer who doesn't hesitate to point her in the right direction So club women were horrified by this civic corruption that they believed allowed prostitution to flourish and the red light Abatement Act was designed to circumvent this corrupt police power by empowering Citizens to directly file public nuisance complaints against suspected houses of prostitution And it's true that these club women were not entirely incorrect It had been recently exposed that San Francisco's Union Labor Party mayor Eugene Schmitz and Abraham Roof the political boss of Fremont Older's ire had been bank-rolling half of the profits from a notorious Barbary Coast brothel on Jackson near Kearney Street, which was then popularly nicknamed the municipal brothel But did that necessarily mean that these women could destroy the institution of prostitution by closing the brothels down and What would become of the state's prostitutes and dance hall workers? Many of the state's legislators argued that this law would simply scatter prostitution throughout the state and out of the confines of these segregated districts The women's clubs responded by beginning a fund to create settlement homes for these newly unemployed and evicted sex workers But as the women of the San Francisco Center of the California Civic League, which is the earliest iteration of the League of Women Voters soon discovered few if any of these sex workers actually agreed to move into these homes and you can see if you go to the Well, the California Historical Society has a box of the League of Women Voters papers that we've been looking through where they have these meeting minutes and they interviewed Hundreds of these Barbary Coast women and asked them would you move into our settlement homes? You know would you reform if we closed down the brothels and the dance halls and really the resounding answer is no the vast vast majority Many of these club women based their assumptions about prostitution on these white slavery narratives that had for the previous decades Taken the nation's media by storm these narratives distilled racism and national anxiety around modernization and immigration and portrayed sex workers as victims enslaved by depraved pimps and Intrapped and assorted an inescapable underworld that was often run by people of color and While many of these stories which were published in Nearly all of the nation's newspapers There were a ton of plays even Eugene O'Neill wrote one of these white slavery narratives as one of his first sort of big off-Broadway productions They were passed out in pamphlets often by suffragettes in in coalition with their their vote get get out the vote paperwork and Many of these stories were claimed to be penned by real sex workers But the vast majority have been debunked as just entirely propagandized See but it was these stories that really inspired the California club women to see themselves as the saviors of these victims who were in their minds really in need of saving And due to concerted pressure placed on the slate legislate state legislatures by the women's clubs The red light abatement act was signed and passed into law in 1913 It was quickly contested and sort of went back and forth. There was a long referendum battle, but that's the real sort of world into which Alice Smith emerges and and one of the main reasons why Fremont older felt it was important to put these women's stories at the forefront of a discussion that Would obviously greatly impact their lives, but from which they had been almost entirely ignored So I'll Smith story it follows her from her humble midwestern Upringing to the shores of the Pacific where she works at different times before she turns to prostitution As a telephone operator a domestic servant a laundry worker and then itinerant farm worker Before turning to freelance prostitution, which eventually leads her to work at various brothels and then as a short stint as a madam Alice's story deals with many controversial topics such as abortion police corruption and the sphere of female interdependence within the brothel system a voice from the underground ran six days a week over the summer of 1913 causing an Unprecedented response from the bulletins readers according to the bulletin nearly 4,000 letters flooded into the offices and nearly 300 were published alongside Alice's story 114 of these letters were penned by other self-proclaimed sex workers and many by single working-class women making the bulletin the primary mouthpiece for sex workers and One could argue perhaps for working-class single women as well during the red light abatement controversy in San Francisco The bulletin unlike rivals such as the pro red light abatement act examiner. That's one of you know Hearst's papers, of course the examiner Refused to fixate upon this so-called white slavery frenzy by early 1913 the paper had announced the upcoming memoir And this is what the paper had to say the bulletin Alice Smith's story and the remarkable letters from women of the underworld which have been printed with it will accomplish several things One end has been attained already no open-minded reader of the story and the letters will ever look upon prostitutes as he Or she once did as much victims of our social system as the children who work in southern cotton mills or the Exploited who give up their lives in the bowels of a skyscraper's foundations In a separate editorial the paper directly criticized the methodology behind a top-down Cural legislation that really failed to adequately address the core issues at hand as it read as the bulletin wrote in this other editorial 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 legislator had struck at one form of vice Holy ignorant as to whether the alternative is a worse form of vice It would build a refuge for women This is one of these settlement homes this idea of Building homes for for for women's you know as I've he said As shelters 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 first at first hand In keeping with what would become a tradition at the bulletin of memoirs being ghosts written from interviews by newspaper staff We uncovered evidence that Donald Lowry who wrote my life in prison and as I was just talking about Was one of these people who interviewed Alice Alice did not write her own words. It was ghosts written by a senior reporter named Ernest Hopkins We discovered that Donald Lowry that we hadn't find any evidence of Donald Lowry actually having any part in this but we really thought he Did And he was one of the people that interviewed Alice now we had a lot of concerns and there was a lot of questions this era of yellow journalism sensationalist papers the Bolton's competing with the Great yellow the the er yellow journal the San Francisco examiner under Hearst And there's a lot of reasons to suggest that perhaps the Bolton made this all up Perhaps it was purely ghosts written that they wanted to sell papers. They wanted to get in on this We weren't sure we really felt that by by looking at it not as a traditional white slavery narrative of which it wasn't but For the most part you can't find actual memoirs During this period that are remotely trustworthy and many academics had pointed that out to us. So people were a little skeptical In our introduction we tried to address this but remarkably two days after the book came out We actually discovered Alice Smith's real name and she was a person I'll tell you very quickly about what happened Ernest Hopkins. He was the ghostwriter in 1930 had turned to writing pulp novels or pulp fiction for a pulp paper and was struggling to make enough money to support his family and this is the first year of The Depression and he said hey remember he wrote to Fremont Older and said remember that that story A voice from the underworld remember that we always wanted to make it into a book but we felt like it would be politically maybe dangerous to actually publish at the time and He said I think now we could do it 1930 and really he was basically saying I think we could make some money off of this But one of the issues was he you know now keep in mind He's the sole writer of this piece. He was the only ghostwriter He wrote it but he's having to ask Fremont Older for permission to publish it because he said remember We must contact Mabel because it is Mabel's story and we need to It was so important to you that any money that we made off of the publication of voice from the underworld that a significant Percentage of those funds had to go towards Mabel and he asked you know where Mabel is. We actually know her last name. We're deciding not because we're The question of anonymity is so important the Bolton kept tridenty Protected for so long and we only stumbled across it in the archives at Cal Berkeley that We are figuring out what we're gonna do with it But we want to keep the spirit of that and not mention her last name until we publish further up on it and So just that and that and that's really if you read the introduction to our book so much of what it deals with is this question of who is she did she really exist and You know if this story is a composite of many different women's stories or if it's totally fabricated Is it still relevant and and we really argue and and make what I hope is a strong case that it's still relevant as far as just revealing different attitudes about sex work and feminism and working-class women and marriage etc at that time But it really you know and one of the main core things that we deal with in our introduction is this question of anonymity and how critical it is Within sex workers narratives even today often are written anonymously And and it's because there there is such an intensive stigma here in our society that pseudonyms are used Not only by sex workers as sort of a performative choice, but as a way of protecting their identities for very valid and critical reasons and so We really felt that You know by by calling her Alice Smith and by apparently taking all these pains to protect who she was Which made it challenging as researchers because we couldn't just say oh, yes We know exactly who this woman is we can trace who she is when she was born when she died etc We instead had to deal with her as sort of a mystery And and invest a lot of faith in the San Francisco bulletin, which which we did not take lightly in any way But that anonymity really is the the sort of critical linchpin of it And that's why like we said we're we're still continuing to Maintain privacy around her name, which you can find if you want to go to the Berkeley-Baincroft Yes, we're not hiding it if you would like to go to that archives It's easy enough to actually find if you know where to look if they're in the Fremont older papers with his correspondence with Ernest Hopkins in 1930 two quick points about that and then we actually have to wrap this up pretty soon Two quick points is that Incredible thing that Ernest Hopkins asked is he said you know what when we publish this we can return the original ending He says that remember we had to change the ending about how she got out of prostitution Remember for political reasons we couldn't tell the real story. Well if we republish this In a book form we can actually tell the actual story Unfortunately, they never did well, I guess fortunately for us they never did because we got to publish it Unfortunately, we don't know what that story is so But that also I Suggest to us that her memoir must have been really quite Pretty accurately to portrayed if they're just talking about the need to change the ending because the ending was something that was maybe politically a bit of a hot potato The other thing which was interesting is Fremont older wrote back to him and said I Saw Mabel within the last year, which means that as of 1930 Mabel still lived in San Francisco And it was no longer a prostitute or that's at least what it would seem Sure, do you want to read let's read a couple let's read a couple excerpts if you want to read We'll just read a couple excerpts both from Alice's story and from some of these letters So you can get a taste of sort of the diversity of these narratives But that was really the thing that clued us into the fact that this was a really important document when we discovered it not only was Alice's story gripping but as we mentioned at least 300 other letters were written into the paper and published alongside specifically by other self-proclaimed sex workers and working-class women And and then of course, you know dozens of other letters written by the mayor of Berkeley wrote in and weighed in on his opinions many club women wrote in and gave their opinions on all sorts of topics from marriage to abortion to Capitalism etc. The list goes on and on and the voices are so wide-ranging in their opinions and their political backgrounds And they're sort of class backgrounds, and that's really what was the most fascinating aspect of this document to us Yeah, we'll read one one excerpt from Alice's memoir one of the main points that comes up over and over Throughout the literature throughout reading primary sources from the time the newspapers But it was that the typical wage for a working-class woman was six dollars a week, which was Historians have claimed to be literally starvation wages And that would the the expectation is that women who are single there's something wrong with them You're supposed to get married, you know And so if you're a single working-class woman, it's like, you know, yeah, okay You have your six dollars a week But you're gonna have to supplement that with a man in some way whether it's a family or whether it's a husband This is what Alice does when she starts Working out before she becomes a prostitute how she's gonna live on six dollars a week. I Went back to my new two dollar room turned on the light sat down on the hard bed and figured things out I had a sort of feeling as if I was hanging by a thin rope over a volcano Six dollars a week take out two for room rent that left for a week for eating clothes Carfare washing and a good time Cut out car fare cut out clothes for the present my old shoes would have to do cut out washing I do it myself in my room cut out. Yes cut out the good times I'd need that four dollars just for eating divide it by seven that meant six sixty cents a day Ten cents for breakfast twenty for lunch thirty for supper that would make twenty four That'd make four twenty a week. I'd be twenty cents short Well, maybe Sundays I'd go without eating only twenty cents worth And those questions about class really are the sort of defining I Think that's the real linchpin of Alice linchpin of Alice Smith's story And and many of these sex workers who wrote into the paper were really complaining about this disc Disconnect excuse me between reformers who tended to come from upper-class educated white Christian families and and and they they felt they were being Pigeon-hulled as victims when in reality they were coming from an incredibly diverse background you know many of these sex workers obviously weren't white and Many were facing extreme poverty, but some were not as well and and just to give you sort of a taste of some of these voices and How sort of controversial and and contemporary they seem nowadays Alma Green who She wrote a series of like seven or eight letters into the newspaper that were really eloquent and lengthy She was a 21 year old sex worker raising two kids in one of the kind of high-class Sprothels here in San Francisco, and we've included one of her letters here in this volume She admitted that she preferred the self-made life of an escort to that of a society woman's charity case And and Georgia G another sex worker wrote as for building a home for us They will never fill it because there is not a woman among us that will accept it unless we are forced to We feel that if we do so there will always be somebody to point the finger of scorn at us no matter how good we tried to be and one of these women Cecil Linden talks about how You know she she was actually a dance hall girl. She wasn't a prostitute She was a dancer and one of these dance clubs on the Barbary Coast and these reform women were essentially Treating her the same way that they would a prostitute and we're trying to create laws Simultaneously as they were closing down the brothels that would also Prevent women from working in establishments that served liquor for instance Which meant that any girl who was a waitress or a Bartender or anything like that would be out of a job obviously or a dancer in one of these clubs And Cecil Linden says when I was 15 years old I was thrown out on the world to make my own way Raised of a good and loving mother and not knowing the ways of the world I entered the nightlife and now I myself would work as a In a proper job and be glad to get it But I can't get work to do and she shows up at one of these sort of reform houses and Asked the associated charities to get her job and they asked her for references And so she she expresses a lot of anger and frustration around that so I was gonna so what if any of you are interested in purchasing the book just We have a 70 page quite a long Introduction where we go into considerably more depth than we have tonight about Questions we have Alice's memoir and then we also have 12 different letters by sex workers Interspersed throughout it to give a little bit of a sense of what it was like to maybe read read it as a date as a serial in the paper We've also been working to publish a number of the letters that we weren't able to include because there are so many and this book Obviously would have been enormous if we included all of them that we loved on our website And so we can give you a card for our website Which has a blog that we've been pretty regularly updating with some of the unpublished letters as well And then we also have an email list of we'll be doing Several event a bunch of events next year Including anyway You can you can have a look at the the final thing that we'll tell you before opening it up for questions I just want to mention the sex workers March really quickly So after the publication of Alice Smith's story the red lighted a man act it passed its final hurdles statewide It took a number of years But by 1917 the city's police force was finally directed to shut down the Barbary Coast and to evict all the brothel workers Which it was 14 hundred women who were all kicked out onto the streets on Valentine's Day 1917 which happy Valentine's Day But before that they they were given a warning by the police department that they would be evicted and So a number of these women decided that they were going to organize a protest which if you read Current histories of sex worker rights organizing The real beginning tends to go back to like say the 1960s 1970s here in San Francisco and this March in 1917 is really a forgotten piece of history and the reason why it's connected to Alice's story is because these Madame's who decided to organize the March needed to get the word out quickly and they approached their friend Fremont older the editor of the San Francisco bulletin who had developed such intimate connections with a number of women of the underworld that they Knew that if he sent out a messenger He could get the word out throughout the Barbary Coast within a night And so these two Madame's Reggie Gamble and Maud Spencer went to the bulletin offices They worked with Fremont older to write a speech to send out letters to all these women and the next morning At least 300 of them showed up on the steps of this church where the Reverend had been one of the primary campaigners For the closure closure of the Barbary Coast essentially and they showed up on his doors they they showed up on the doorstep they flooded the church pews and Reggie Gamble marched up to the pulpit and Gave a whole speech about you know, you want us gone, but where do you want us to go? Are you going to offer us work? You know living wages that we can live off of if we're not prostitutes And we don't mean this six dollars a week that you that you guys keep offering that they're paying us we mean an actual living wage and The Reverend Paul Smith kind of balked and had nothing to say back to them. Now, of course, you know, as I said this You know, it's it's a protest. It didn't mean that a month later. They weren't all evicted but it connects this greater history of of Sex workers rights organizing and social justice organizing here in San Francisco That we believe began or that most people historians believe began in the 70s and the 60s all the way back here to 2017 and Our our next scheduled event actually is with the Tenderloin Museum on January 25th, which is the hundred-year anniversary of this protest We're gonna be working with some contemporary sex worker rights activists to stage another march to the site of the of the classic church So if you're interested in that event Do sign up on our email list and we'll keep you in the know Is there any yeah, I turn over to questions