Where to start with this book review…
I write a historical mystery series set in 1900 San Francisco. So when I came across mention of the 1913 Bulletin newspaper serial while reading My Own Story by Fremont Older for research, it instantly intrigued me. I went online to see if I could find it in the Bulletin archives. Alas, there are no digital archives for the Bulletin, and A Voice From the Underworld was nowhere to be found online. So I was thrilled to find Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute, and so thankful to Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus for digging through library archives. They saved me a lot of time!
But still, I was expecting to slog my way through a dry, 100 year-old narrative and pick out any useful tidbits along the way in the name of research. So I was completely taken by surprise when I couldn’t put it down!
Alice Smith’s life story pulls you along from page to page, and it’s small wonder that this story kept the Bulletin readers eagerly awaiting every new installment. It’s also easy to see why the majority of male readers began writing nasty letters to the editor. Her narrative holds a stark mirror to the face of men. And the majority didn't like what they saw. Even going so far as to claim that the woman was making up stories about men.
Whether Alice Smith was one woman telling her tale or the combination of multiple prostitutes and their stories, remains a mystery. Although, from what I’ve read of Fremont Older, I tend to think it was the story of one woman. But either way, it’s a story that could easily (and sadly) be told in our modern day. So little has actually changed.
Common history paints the past with broad strokes, and the idea of ‘prim and proper’ Victorians and Edwardians endures. But in 1913, economic justice, labor rights, prison reform, and the inherent dignity of sex workers as human beings was being discussed in the San Francisco Bulletin. It’s a conversation that we are still having as a society. And in some places, we aren’t having those conversations enough.
The slow, downward spiral of her life, reading of betrayal after betrayal by family and so-called friends, the insights, and the bleak truth in this memoir go straight to the heart, because it’s a story that has been repeated by tens of thousands of women, and it’s a story that will (sadly) be told again… countless times.
Whether you are interested in San Francisco history, women’s rights, or none of the above, I’d recommend this book to everyone. Because this is a human story. And as Alice said so long ago, “Can’t people understand that they are responsible for each other, in lots of ways?”
Some quotes from memoir:
“Every girl that is locked out at night, or that is made to feel she isn’t wanted at home, is just that much nearer the brothel—nearer than people suppose.”
“We were the men’s big show; put there by men; kept there for the use of 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 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 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.”
“Don’t you see how I despise you and hate you in my heart, for the way you have used me? Don’t you think I would spit on you in scorn, if it wasn’t just for your money? … it’s in every woman’s mind when she bows down as a prostitute before one of these “lords of creation”.”
“There’s only one thing in this world that is harder and more appalling than the fight to leave prostitution; and that is to stay a prostitution.”
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An extremely interesting book
Reviewed in France on September 2, 2018
