Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute Book Launch 3/19, 7pm

Join us at the store on Saturday, March 19th at 7pm for the launch of Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute edited by Devon Angus and Ivy Anderson.

About the Event:

"A Voice from the Underworld," the serialized version of Alice Smith's story, originally published in the San Francisco Bulletin in 1913, has until its recent republication, gone forgotten as a key piece of radical U.S. history. Alice Smith's story attracted the attention of the famed anarchist and feminist activist Emma Goldman, who found "A Voice from the Underworld", and the many letters written in response by other working class women and sex workers, to offer a uniquely radical perspective on the questions of sex, class, gender, and marriage. The publication of "A Voice from the Underworld" also marks a significant transition in the career of newspaper editor Fremont Older, who later gained fame within radical circles for his work with criminals Donald Lowrie and Jack Black in the name of prison reform, and his defense of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, San Francisco's own Sacco and Vanzetti, who were wrongfully convicted of bombing the pro-war "Preparedness Day" parade that took place in 1916. In 1917, Fremont Older would work with several of the sex workers he had met during the run of Alice's story to organize the first sex worker's rights protest in U.S. history, which took place on January 25th, 1917. Join Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus in a discussion about these early strains of activism and how they influenced later feminist, queer, and sex worker's rights movements.


About the Editors:

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.

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.