Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute (With a New Preface)

Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute (With a New Preface)
Paperback, 5.5 x 8.25, 352 pages | Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781597147217.

By Devon Angus , Ivy Anderson

“An exciting and beautiful story.” —Ottessa Moshfegh

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.

Winner of the 2015 California Historical Society Book Award

In 1913 the San Francisco Bulletin published a serialized, ghostwritten memoir of a prostitute who went by the moniker Alice Smith. “A Voice from the Underworld” detailed Alice’s humble Midwestern upbringing and her struggle to find aboveboard work, and it candidly related the harrowing events she endured after entering “the life.” Never had prostitute narratives been as frank in their discussion of topics such as abortion, police corruption, and the unwritten laws of the brothel. 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.

With Alice, filmmakers and writers Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus present the memoirs of Alice Smith and a selection of letters her story elicited. In an introduction contextualizing Alice’s story, they reveal themes that extend from Alice’s experience in the early twentieth century to issues facing sex workers today. This edition features a new preface detailing the discoveries made about this history since the book’s original publication in 2016.

Categories Forthcoming | History | Memoir | Social Justice

About the Authors

Devon Angus

Devon Angus

Devon Angus is an artist, activist, and historian based in San Francisco. He composed and performed a conceptual folk operetta based on San Francisco history, The Ghosts of Barbary, throughout the Bay Area, Switzerland, and Italy. He organized and published a series of oral histories of immigrants in the Catskills region, and was the recipient of an arts grant through the New York State Council on the Arts for his show Songs and Stories of Old New York.

Ivy Anderson

Ivy Anderson

Ivy Anderson is a San Francisco–based writer who focuses on issues of ecology and radical history. Her reportage on water management issues was published in Water Efficiency Magazine and and her poetry in Poecology. She holds a B.A. in environmental studies with a minor in geography, runs a community garden, and is on the board of a bookstore collective in San Francisco.

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