FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute Returns in New Edition, Illuminating the Hidden History of Sex Workers' Lives and Labor in Early California
Edited by Bay Area historians Devon Angus and Ivy Anderson, the republished volume brings a landmark firsthand account of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast—and the voices of hundreds of working women—back into print with a new preface.
BERKELEY, Calif. — More than a century ago, readers across California followed the remarkable story of “Alice,” an anonymous sex worker whose serialized memoir, “A Voice from the Underworld,” appeared in the San Francisco Bulletin in 1913. Writing under a pseudonym, Alice recounted her journey from childhood to adulthood and offered an unflinching portrait of life in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast red-light district.
The series became a statewide sensation. Readers responded in droves, sending letters from every corner of California—many written by sex workers themselves. The Bulletin published hundreds of these responses alongside Alice’s memoir, creating one of the earliest public forums in which sex workers could tell their own stories in their own words.
Now, Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute, edited by Bay Area historians Devon Angus and Ivy Anderson, brings together Alice’s complete memoir and the accompanying letters in a single volume. Originally published by Heyday in 2016 and now reissued with a new preface by the editors, the book restores an extraordinary primary source to readers and scholars while highlighting its enduring relevance to conversations about labor, gender equality, historical erasure, and the politics of visibility.
At a time when the histories of sex workers have often been excluded from mainstream narratives of workers’ rights and women’s movements, Alice offers a rare firsthand record of lives lived at society’s margins. The collection reveals not only Alice’s remarkable story but also the collective voices of women whose experiences have too often gone undocumented.
Both a compelling personal memoir and an invaluable historical archive, Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute invites readers to reconsider California’s past through the perspectives of women whose lives shaped it, even as they were written out of its history.
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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.
