Voices from the Underworld: The Barbary Coast

By Ivy Anderson and Devon Angusrsovon Angus

In Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute (winner of the California Historical Society 2015 Book Award), we have brought to light the personal account of a sex worker’s life in Progressive Era California for the first time in over a century.  Alice’s story, which moves through various landscapes of vice across the state of California, reveals much about poverty, crime, and sex, and how people managed these aspects of life in the public sphere in 1913. While citizens around the state argued the benefits and drawbacks of the Red Light Abatement Act, a law that aimed to end the quasi-legal brothel system, which had flourished in California since the days of the Gold Rush, the voices of sex workers themselves were for the most part ignored or manipulated for use in propaganda. By publishing  sex worker Alice Smith’s memoir “A Voice From the Underworld,” and 114 letters written by other self proclaimed sex workers during the summer of 1913, the San Francisco Bulletin newspaper became a platform for society’s pariahs to voice their stance on a question that would significantly impact their lives and livelihoods: what shall we do with the infamous vice districts of California, such as the Barbary Coast? And what shall happen to the women of the vice districts?

Pacific Street, 1913. SAN FRANCISCO HISTORY CENTER, SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY

The Barbary Coast, which today is the downtown district situated between Chinatown, North Beach, the waterfront and the Financial District, was San Francisco’s primary center for vice by the 1860’s. Named after a notorious stretch of North African coastline famous for piracy,  the Barbary Coast developed a reputation that rivaled any vice district in the United States, and like Storyville in New Orleans or New York’s Bowery, this jumble of gambling halls, brothels, and saloons was tacitly accepted as a necessary aspect of the urban landscape. But in San Francisco, this vice district made up almost the entirety of the urban landscape, which developed in a number of haphazard stages spurred by the immediate influx of money and single men during the gold rush years. Men seeking their fortunes, far from the social constraints of their families, spent freely on gambling and prostitution. Outnumbering women 50 to 1 in the early years of the Gold Rush, men would turn to the prostitutes of the city to fulfill important social roles, and for a few years prostitutes and madams could acquire both money and status, though this varied widely: women of color, especially Chinese and Native American women, faced exploitation in ways that white women simply didn’t. All of this happened throughout the city; gambling and prostitution could be found in almost any corner of San Francisco. This laissez faire approach to morality began to shift as “proper” women began moving in, serving their role as “civilizers” to the rough and tumble shantytown metropolis. During the 1860’s, as families and businessmen began conceiving of San Francisco as a city of global importance, moralizing forces attempted to sequester all gambling, sex, crime, and lascivious entertainment into the the newly segregated district of the Barbary Coast.

Interior of the Moulin Rouge nightclub in the Barbary Coast, 1911. SAN FRANCISCO HISTORY CENTER, SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY

The development of the Barbary Coast differed from other vice districts in other American cities. In other cities, vice districts were created to deflect the uncontrollable passions of male sexuality away from “proper” women towards the “fallen” women of the brothels and the street corners. According to popular belief, prostitutes were born flawed and irredeemable. They were to be kept in vice districts to serve as safety valves, keeping “proper” women safe from sexual assault. San Francisco, on the other hand, didn’t create a vice district so much as it shrunk the morality of the Gold Rush days into a district: the Barbary Coast. Thus the ‘Coast, as it was nicknamed, was both an unsavory symbol of the lawless days of ‘49 that had been “civilized” by the good people of the city and a center of nostalgia for those romantic and tumultuous early years. This nostalgia seems to live on even in today’s San Francisco; in North Beach alone, a number of new businesses have adopted names and decor reminiscent of that lawless time: the Belle Cora wine bar, for instance, and the Devil’s Acre, named after a particularly notorious stretch of the neighborhood.

Women in the Barbary Coast, 1890's. SAN FRANCISCO HISTORY CENTER, SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY

During the Progressive Era, major changes in the American political landscape created new ideas about vice and how to manage it. A new concept of prostitution emerged informed especially by idealistic Progressive reformers, eugenicists, feminists, clergy, and journalists and the mass media, and prostitutes were suddenly seen not as a necessary evil, but as either victims in need of rescue or a disease in need of eradication. Supporters of the Red Light Abatement Act argued that dismantling the California’s segregated districts, like the Barbary Coast, would destroy the undesirable industry of prostitution while allowing its denizens an opportunity for a new reformed life. But what we find when we read the letters written by sex workers themselves, their relationship to the Barbary Coast was much more complicated than these reformers could have imagined. While many prostitutes that wrote into the Bulletin sought out assistance, several bristled under the label of “victim,” seeking to keep their own sense of dignity and agency within the confines of their life in the “underworld”. Alice Smith was one of these women. 

The following excerpt is from Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute. Having been a freelancer,  a brothel worker, and a madam throughout California, Alice Smith looks at the Barbary Coast through a critical lens:

I’m just going to draw a few pictures of what I saw in the San Francisco segregated district.

Never will I forget my first night in the house. My great memory is of the crowd that kept reeling and surging through the parlor, where we girls sat waiting. It was a morbid mob—boys from the high school, kids in their teens, who were probably office boys, well dressed men, hoboes, old diseased wrecks; failures and fun seekers, clubmen and criminals, the foul-minded young and the foul-minded old, all mixed together in one unhealthy, sickening mass.

Not one in twenty came to stay. Not one in fifteen came even to spend money on drinks. I felt that I had ceased to be just a prostitute, and had become an animal in a menagerie, to be stared at and called foul names.

Most of the men and boys would stand there in the doorway and stare slowly around at each of the girls in turn, with grins on their faces and that beastly look in their eyes that makes you hate all men. And the talk they would use! I was accustomed to hearing cursing and swearing, in a certain amount and degree, but before I had sat in that parlor an hour I heard things said that I had never heard before. When I had learned the filth that dropped from the lips of those men and boys—the boys hurt the worst, to hear mere kids talk that way—I began to understand a little more what prostitution really was. We were the men’s big show; put there by men; kept there for the use of by men, to be used as they chose and talked to as they chose, meant forever to be the satisfaction and the victims of their worst hours. Our business in life was to help men when they were at their lowest. Our trade was not our own; it wasn’t even invented by us; it was created by the men when they had a mind to be lower than animals.

And they were lower than animals. I don’t know whether animals have speech; but if they have, they don’t use it as men do. And animals don’t have prostitution. It took men to achieve that.

The house I was in wasn’t one of the worst in the district. We had a locked front door, and the men and boys had to knock before they could come in. many of the places in the district just have a swinging door, and the crowd that looks the girls over is, of course, just so much worse. I don’t like to picture what it is for the girls in those places.

Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus will be publicly presenting their research on two occasions this week. They will be speaking at UC Berkeley on Thursday, November 17th as a part of the California Studies Department Dinner Series. On Saturday, November 19th they will be leading a free walking tour through San Francisco’s Barbary Coast; this tour is hosted by City Lights Booksellers and Publishers. Both events require RSVPs. For more information on upcoming events, where to purchase the book, and more, visit www.voicesfromtheunderworld.com

For more information, see this new article from the SFGate: 

Alice: Memoirs of A Barbary Coast Prostitute

In 1913, under the shadow of the upcoming Panama Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco’s denizens were arguing about the city’s identity. Celebrating its rise from the ashes of the 1906 earthquake and fire, many hoped a “new” San Francisco could be presented during the world’s fair, a San Francisco free from the corruption and vice that had marked it for generations. The Barbary Coast, centered around the brothels, bars, and dance halls of lower Pacific St., came to symbolize blight for much of the city’s upper crust, and clergymen, clubwomen, reformers, and anti-vice newspapers rallied behind the state’s Red Light Abatement law in an attempt to destroy the classic brothel system that had flourished since the gold rush. While anti-vice activists argued the evils of “the Coast” and planned settlement houses for the evicted “red sisters” of the brothels, the voices of the sex workers themselves remained quiet or downright silenced. The attitudes of many in the city were represented by a cartoon in the Hearst owned Examiner, in which a rat in a cage, with the word “vice” sprawled across its body, was being dropped into a bucket of water to drown.

            

The Bulletin, a paper with a long history of anti-vice vigilantism, surprisingly took a different tack. The paper’s editor, Fremont Older, had cut his teeth as a crusading newspaperman attacking the elaborate systems of graft and corruption that had been a mainstay of San Francisco political life since the earliest years of the city. Following a philosophical shift that came about in the waning days of the graft trials of political boss Abe Ruef, Older published a series of memoirs that sought to give a voice to those who had struggled to be heard during this transitional time. Donald Lowrie’s My Life in Prison, from 1912, uncovered institutional torture in California’s prisons. Jack Black, paroled under Fremont Older’s care in 1913, would pen his underworld classic You Can’t Win under Older’s editorship. Alice Smith’s “A Voice from the Underworld,” lost for over a hundred years, brought yet another obscured voice to the forefront of one of California’s most heated political debates.

            

In Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute, Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus have collected this ghostwritten memoir, written through a series of interviews with Bulletin reporters, for the first time since its publication as a serial in 1913. “A Voice from the Underworld” told the story of “Alice Smith”, a midwestern working class girl who turned to sex work throughout various cities and towns in California in the early years of the 20th century. Her story, as it ran through the summer and early fall of 1913, resulted in some 4,000 letters written into the paper. Of the nearly 300 that were printed, 114 were by sex workers and 30 were by working class women who had considered sex work for themselves. These letters, taken together with Alice’s memoir, provided a platform in which sex workers’ voices, and the voices of poor and working class women, could be heard amidst the din of the louder anti-vice reformers. Four years later, when the Barbary Coast was finally shuttered, madams Maude Spencer and Reggie Gamble turned to Fremont Older for help organizing what may have been the first sex worker’s rights protest in modern history. 

Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute is the winner of the California Historical Society 2015 Book Award, and will officially launch with a presentation here at the California Historical Society on October 27th. Today we have a sample of Alice’s story to share with you. For more information about upcoming events, where to purchase the book, and to read more exclusive content, you can visit www.voicesfromtheunderworld.com

From Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute:

I hadn’t ever been in a rooming house before. I climbed up the stairway and rang the bell by the desk. A woman answered.

“How much do you charge for a small room?” I said. “Steady?’

She looked me over kind of funny. I guess my greenness sort of stuck out, and she wondered what was my game.

“Two dollars a week,” she replied.

I didn’t make any answer, but just walked out and went right on to my Aunt Eleanor’s.

“Auntie,” I said, “I’m going to leave here. I’ve got another job.” I hadn’t, but I had to break away somehow.

She looked surprised, and I could see her thinking the same that grandma had thought—that I was ungrateful. It made me madder than ever.

“I don’t know whether you ever meant to pay me anything for all the work I’ve done,” I said, thoroughly mad. “But if you did, I wish you’d do it now. My feet are just on the ground.”

Well, after a little side-stepping she paid me, making as much over it as if she was doing me the greatest favor of my life. And what do you think she gave me?

Three dollars. For two month’s work.

“Thank you, aunt,” I said, trying to hold my temper. “I’ll try to remember this.”

Then I went and got my things together, marched downstairs to that rooming-house, and rented that two dollar room. I paid the first week’s rent out of the three dollars my aunt had just given me. The shoes would have to come later; I was going to be a poor working-girl now.

Anyhow, I told myself, I was free of relatives for good and all. No more of them for me, except maybe Grandmother Smith. She had brought me here, and she ought to take a little care of me, if I should ever be broke. But no more of step-mothers, aunts, cousins or any of the rest.

Feeling as if I had cut loose from one of my last holds on the world, I went downstairs and walked over to the laundry.

“Any experience?” asked the boss of the laundry.

He was a tall man with a black mustache, and he grinned at me in a way I didn’t quite like.

“Not in this work,” I answered.

“Well,” he replied, “you’re a good looking girl. I can take you on, I guess.”

“What pay?” I asked.

“Six dollars a week,” he said, grinning again.

“But I can’t live on that!” My heart sank.

“Oh, that’s all right,” said the man, grinning worse than ever. “Didn’t I say you was a good looking girl? You can pick up lots of easy money on the side.”

He winked over my head at some other girl who was passing by.

Money on the side! Well, here was something new. What did he mean? Then I knew. That same old fear again.

“All right, I’ll take the job,” I said. “I guess, as you say, I can get along.”

He laughed at that, as if it was a real good joke. I had just said it to be sassy, because he might not want to give me the job otherwise. He told me to come around seven the next morning.

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 four a week for eating, clothes, carfare, washing and a good time.

Cut out carfare. Cut out clothes—for the present. My old shoes would have to do. Cut out washing—I’d do it myself, in my room. Cut out—yes—cut out the good time. I’d need that four dollars just for eating. Divide it by seven. That meant sixty cents a day. Ten cents for breakfast, twenty for lunch, thirty for supper. That would make four-twenty a week—I’d be twenty cents short.

Well, maybe Sundays I’d go without eating, only twenty cents worth.

Maybe someday I’d get a raise in pay. Anyhow, I was free of relatives. That thought brought back that hard, don’t-care feeling.

Or maybe—there was that easy money to be made “on the side.” No; not for me. That didn’t attract me at all. I wasn’t far enough along for that. But the idea stayed with me, and bothered me.

Yes, Virginia, We Have Another Election Coming Up

First Women to Vote in California, 1912; California Historical Society, CHS2011.559

After a long battle, California finally granted women the right to vote in state elections in October 1911. In this photograph, three of the first women in the state to vote cast their ballots at a poll booth in March 1912. It was not until 1920, with the ratification of the 19th Amendment, that the national fight for women’s suffrage ended. Even then, women were slow to acquire the voting habit, taking about 60 years to equal or exceed the number of male voters casting ballots, according to the Pew Research.   

By Steve Swatt

Voters in many parts of California face another Election Day on November 3 that few are aware of and in which even fewer will participate. We won’t be electing a president or governor, but voters throughout California will be deciding local, nonpartisan issues—such as mayor and sheriff in San Francisco, school board members in Palos Verdes and El Segundo, and local taxes in Hermosa Beach and South Pasadena.