Alice

Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute

Ivy Anderson, Devon Angus, Ivy Anderson, Devon Angus, Ivy Anderson, Devon Angus

• Publisher: Heyday
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781597143769
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The collected memoirs of a 1913 San Francisco sex worker, their effect on society at the time, and where they fit in today's world.

In 1913 the San Francisco Bulletin published a serialized, ghostwritten memoir of a prostitute who went by Alice Smith. "A Voice from the Underworld" detailed Alice's humble Midwestern upbringing and her struggle to find aboveboard work, and candidly related the harrowing events she endured after entering "the life."

While prostitute narratives had been published before, never had they been as frank in their discussion of the underworld, including topics such as abortion, police corruption, and the unwritten laws of the brothel. Throughout the series, Alice strongly criticized the society that failed her and so many other women, but, just as acutely, she longed to be welcomed back from the margins. The response to Alice's story was unprecedented: four thousand letters poured into the Bulletin, many of which were written by other prostitutes ready to share their own stories; and it inspired what may have been the first sex worker rights protest in modern history.

An introduction contextualizes "A Voice from the Underworld" amid Progressive Era sensationalistic journalism and shifting ideas of gender roles, and reveals themes in Alice's story that extend to issues facing sex workers today.

Winner of the California Historical Society Book Award

"Essential reading for anyone interested in the rich history of sexual commerce in the United States."—Gretchen Soderlund, author of Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885-1917 "Not only for Bay Area history buffs, Alice will enlighten all readers to early shifts in gender roles and societal correlations today."—Cassie Duggan, Literary Hub

A Voice from the Underworld
PART I

I had eighty dollars. I had earned that money in the usual way.

It was Christmastide—just the twentieth of December. I was out buying presents. The shops were crowded, and all about me people were spending their money as most of them didn’t spend it very often—for the happiness of their friends. I entered a big department store. Standing by a counter, I reached into my purse and got out a list of people I was to remember with presents. The whole eighty dollars should go, of course. There was always more to be made. That particular money had come, it happened, rather easy; and easy it should go.

Eighty dollars. All the girls in my house would remember me—that was certain. I must remember all of them. I wanted to, anyway. There was a lot of petty quarrelling and backbiting and all of that; but I knew, if ever I got up against it, where I could find the best friends in the world, the ones who would care for me most freely and most consciously.

Sixteen of them. Four dollars apiece for the girls’ presents. Say, sixty-five dollars for the bunch.

Then there was the madam. Of course the landlady must have her present—a costly one. Yet I liked her. She had ability. She had tact. We girls were too ready to pick on her at times. If we were in a position to be bossed around by her, it was nobody’s fault—just the fault of circumstances.

All right. Fifteen dollars for a present for madam.

Fifteen dollars left—

Then something happened.

You know that Christmassy feeling that gets on the air during the holidays. It seems as though all the Christmas trees you ever saw in your life were just around the corner, and that all their fragrant smell and sparkling lights and beautiful tinsel and strings of popcorn were sort of floating in the air. You can go around among the shops, where that flavor is keenest, with every intention in the world of covering up your feelings; you can’t make good.

Right in the middle of my calculations I had thought of my grandfather.

Somehow things looked different right away.

It had not been that often, at that particular period of my life, that the thought and memory of my grandfather had a chance to break through. I kept it under pretty well. With the aid of the excitement and tobacco smoke and drink—not that very much of that for me, but some—and the strain of the wakeful nights and sleepy days, I kept grandpa out of the way.

At that time—it was about five years ago—I seemed to have drifted further than at any time before or since. The greater part of me was dead and hard. All my finer sensibilities were benumbed. I was inclined to laugh when things came up that should have touched me; and there wasn’t so much about that laughter that was false. It was just hard. I had lost my ambition, my energy, my standards. I lived in a kind of haze. I could not like the life, I could not hate it; I just didn’t care.

When the smell of that holly, or Christmas tree, or whatever it was, brought my grandfather sharply to mind, I was a bit surprised. For a moment I was angry.

Why on earth should I be plagued with that now? Grandpa was living, where I had left him a few years before, back in that little Middle Western village; that tiny town of sixteen houses. I hadn’t written to him in six months; I had drifted out of the habit of writing; I had to tell too many lies. There was no reason why I should think about grandpa now.

Eighty dollars. When I lived with grandfather, before I left home, I used to do one whole week’s drudgery at housework for a dollar and a half a week. That was the way money was valued back there. And grandfather—he was a carpenter and painter; he used to get not over two dollars a day. He was an old man now, too; well over sixty.

Suppose—I didn’t want to think it, but I did—suppose I were to send grandfather some money?

Well, that would be a lot of trouble. I had only gold and silver and—I cast one glance toward the money order window—it would take until the day after tomorrow to get a money order. The only way would be to chase down to some bank and get a treasury note.

Then I would have to write a letter—and how on earth was I to do that? What should I tell him? What had I told him last time I wrote, four or five months ago? How could I fix up my letter so that he would think I was happy, so that he wouldn’t suspect?

You see, grandpa had raised me and cared for me, from the time my father married my stepmother, when I was a baby of three, until I was nearly eighteen. There was no bitterness, no hardness, in my thought of him. He was the idol of my girlhood and he was my idol still, in spite of everything.

I would send him the whole eighty dollars. No—that would never do. He would ask how I got so much. Fifty? No; no honest waitress or laundry worker could send so much. Fifteen dollars; that would be about right.

Fifteen dollars for grandpa, and the same for the madam. Oh, what a life—

I couldn’t very well give the madam any less and look friendly, and I could hardly give grandpa any more and seem straight. So I decided it that way. Fifty dollars would do for the girls.

Thinking hard over that letter in the back of my head, I went about my purchases. A big box of stationery for Mabel, to write to her mother on—her mother doesn’t know that she’s in the life. Thinks she’s a candy girl. Something decent to read for Bessie—she’s got an education, and if I had that I wouldn’t be here today. What’s some decent poet—Tennyson? All right, a volume of Tennyson for Bessie. A box of fine candies for Grace; she can feed them to her young men, with that regular allowance of two and a half a day. My purchases were soon made. Everything to be delivered at the house.

I bought a fancy little bag of silk, and in it I put the fifteen dollars for the madam and mailed it.

I was getting increasingly doubtful about that letter. Why not try to write it upstairs? There was a woman’s waiting room. I climbed the stairs and found a vacant desk.

H’m. Let’s see. Am I a waitress or a candy girl? Suppose I say I am in housework? But the address—how much am I getting? Do I like my job? Am I well? Is there any prospect of my coming home for a visit? How long have I been working here? Is my boss kind? Sure he is, and I’ll say he has kind blue eyes like Uncle Ed’s. Oh,—poor old grandpa!

Is it right to keep Christmas when one has to lie? Wouldn’t it be better—better and more merciful in the long run—to tell grandfather the truth? Suppose I put it down here now,—“Dear Grandpa: I am a prostitute—”

No; that isn’t possible. I don’t want to be a murderer as well as a liar. Yet, I do want to send him that money. I’ll carry the job through—

There. It’s finished. I said I was a waitress in a restaurant, and the boss was kind, and I was thinking of getting a better job soon, as I only got seven dollars a week. Was in a rush to get to work, so no more now from his loving Alice.

I stepped out onto the street and paused for a moment, trying to remember which way was the bank. An auto came rolling along the street, close to the curb. It was a big machine, with a bunch of men and girls in it—friends of mine.

“Hello! Why, there’s Alice! Wait a moment! Stop!”

The chauffeur drew up alongside the curb.

“Jump right in and come along. We’re just going for a little spin out through the park.”

They made room for me. I climbed in, smiling. It was too good a chance to be missed. Auto rides were none too frequent. I would get the bank note later.

The crowd sped out along the road. We reached the park; stopped for a time at a quiet beer garden; then out, further out into the country, to a roadhouse. We started buying more and more beer; then we suddenly switched to champagne.

I sort of came to in the morning. We were still out at the roadhouse. The rest of the crowd was drunk. I was still dizzy. I had only a dim remembrance of what had occurred.

What had I been doing? Oh yes: the banknote for grandpa.

I groped hurriedly in my purse. As I thought—I had spent it. It must have gone for champagne.

And the letter? What could have—?

Those scraps on the floor. I had torn it up, when the fun became furious, to prevent their getting a hold of it.

The following April I heard through my sister that my grandfather was dead.

You might think grandpa would get a little dim to me after all these years. But time doesn’t touch him. And what I know about other men doesn’t touch him, either. Today he seems just as he always did when I was a little girl—about seven miles higher than anybody else in the world; a kind of god.

I was left under grandpa’s care and grandma’s earlier than I can remember. It was when my father married my stepmother and went away. Grandpa was a carpenter. At first we lived on a farm near a crossroads; then we moved to a little town, seven miles from the railroad, out in the middle of a big farming country.

I wish I could make you see that life as I see it.

It was so simple, so quiet. There was a lot of hard work in it, too, especially for the women. But it was a natural life; that was the greatest thing about it.

I often think today: “Now if I could only get the money, I know what I’d do. I’d buy a little place, out in some pretty country town, and have my friends around me, and go back to the same sort of life I lived when I was a girl.” But again, I don’t know; maybe I couldn’t make a go of it now. The quiet might drive me half-crazy. This life spoils one for anything natural; that’s the fearful pity of it.

Grandpa and grandma were my mother’s parents. My mother died when I wasn’t yet a year old, and papa—my, but that name sounds queer as I say it now!—papa married again. I was three, and my sister, Emma, was five, when he got interested in a young girl, a farmer’s daughter, sixteen years old. There was some sort of mixup over it; I never knew exactly what; anyway, he married her and they went West. I never saw papa again until I was seventeen.

Grandma and grandpa kept me, and Emma was sent a little while afterward out to papa’s parents, who lived in the same town where papa had gone. It always seemed odd to me to think I had a sister. I used to write to her, maybe once a month; but she never seemed real.

Except for the letters, you see, the only thing I had to go on was one fool memory. It is almost the first thing I remember, and I couldn’t have been more than four. There were a lot of people around and considerable noise, and I was playing with some little girl—my sister, though I don’t remember how she looked—and in the next room somebody was ringing a bell. As a memory, that didn’t amount to much, but it was the best I had for about thirteen years.

Though grandpa and grandma naturally didn’t have a whole lot of use for my father, they never said hard things of him before me. That was just like them; they didn’t like him, but they had their own ideas about what was fair to him, and about what his daughter ought to think. They weren’t going to put anything in my head that oughtn’t to be there.

My grandmother was good to me, and all that; but grandpa and I were chums.

We always kept quite a large garden—two or three acres. Every spring grandpa would lay off for a few days to plant his truck. That was the time of my great glory. I would lay off, too—from school—and work with grandpa from sun-up to dark.

He would let me drop the beans and peas, and cut and drop the potatoes, after he had prepared the ground. I never cared how tired I got—that was real work, I thought, and not just housework. I think grandpa got as much fun out of it as I did. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Josh Sides
• Preface
• Introduction
• Notes
• “A Voice from the Underworld”: Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Acknowledgments
• Further Reading
• About the Authors
• About the California Historical Society Book Award