FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sex Worker’s Memoirs from Turn-of-the-century San Francisco Shine a Light on a Hidden History of Workers’ Rights and Women’s Equality
Edited by Bay Area historians Devon Angus and Ivy Anderson, Alice reflects on the significance and enduring legacy of an extraordinary piece of California history.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — In 1913, readers of the San Francisco Bulletin were transfixed by the serial publication of “A Voice from the Underworld,” the serialized memoir of a sex worker in the city’s Red Light district, the so-called Barbary Coast. Under the pseudonym Alice, these memoirs traced her life from childhood to young adulthood in California, frankly describing the harrowing experiences she had as a sex worker in the Paris of the West. The memoirs elicited an enormous public response; letters poured in from every region of the state, many of which were penned by sex workers themselves. Hundreds of these letters were published alongside the memoir, offering sex workers a public forum in which to share their stories. Highly influential at its time, “A Voice from the Underworld” stands alone as a primary source document for these women’s stories, all too often excluded from mainstream efforts for gender equality and worker’s rights.
In Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute, editors Devon Angus and Ivy Anderson have gathered the columns and letters from the pages of the Bulletin together in a single volume, introducing and contextualizing the significance of these accounts to contemporary struggles for sex worker’s rights, historical erasure, and the politics of visibility. Never before available outside of the library, Alice’s voice and story still hold power today. First released by Heyday in 2016, and now republished with a new preface by the editors, Alice is at once a fascinating document from a bygone century and a riveting account of a life on society’s margins.
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Ivy Anderson is a San Francisco based writer by way of Ojai, California. Focused on issues of Bay Area ecology and radical history, her reportage on water management issues has recently been published in Water Efficiency Magazine and her poetry in Poecology. She holds a BA in Environmental Studies with a Minor in Geography, runs a community garden, is on the board of a book store collective in San Francisco, and is currently leading a workshop on historic research through the Yerba Buena Center for the Art’s sponsored Healing Arts Collective Project.
Devon Angus is an artist, activist, and historian based in San Francisco, California. He has composed and performed a conceptual folk operetta based on San Francisco history, “The Ghosts of Barbary”, throughout the Bay Area, Switzerland, and Italy in 2014. He has organized and published a series of oral histories of immigrants in the Catskills region through the Skene Memorial Library in Fleischmanns, New York between 2001-2003 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” in 2002. He is currently pursuing a History MA at San Francisco State University.
