Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, the podcast that I can't make the same joke introduction to twice in a row, so I can't talk about adjectives, and then I feel like I don't know how to It's a show about cool people in history. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and your guest today for all of this week is Courtney Cosack.
Yeah that's me. Hi, guys, nice, Nice to be back.
Courtney is a most importantly a dog mom, but also is an compulsive podcaster. Sometimes records podcasts walking around the house into a Zoom microphone and then they don't even go anywhere because no one has the heart to tell her that it is not recording.
Oh you're talking shit. I have a podcast about making podcasts, so that would be really bad if I was so terrible at it.
Wait, what's your podcast by making podcasts?
Podcast bestie?
Oh well, that that makes sense. Yeah. I've probably said this on air before, but I once had a stress stream where I had to tell someone I was a podcaster because I like, I'm kind of obsessively honest, and someone's like, what do you do for a living, And I was like, I'm a podcaster.
I know it is kind of a weird thing, like when I'm just have to admit it to someone random, like I'm getting a blowout or something, and then it's a weird thing to talk about.
Try and try being me explaining to men on dating apps what you do for a living.
I try.
I try being honest about it. I try giving them the most straightforward version of it. I try dumbing it down.
I try like basically lying that.
It's still They're like, oh uh, can you tell me what you do?
And I'm like, I fucking just did.
Or they like, like give successful podcast networks in the fucking world.
It's very confusing. It's very confusing for them. But you're blonde, Yeah, like, what what do you mean there's the bleach in your hair?
What?
Yeah, sorry, I just vented.
I'm Sophie. I'm the producer. Yep.
But see, you do a respectable job podcast producer. That is a respectable line of work, because that automatically clears the air that there's like money involved.
Yeah, you know, totally. Otherwise what if? What if? What if they're like, what do you do for a living? I've secured the bag?
Uh, I catfish and rob people on Tinder.
What do you do for Yeah? Oh my god. Well, if you've been listening to this series, you know that cute boys, Yeah, the enemy of their existence.
Yeah, yeah, we we we cannot allow this to go on any further.
Yeah.
Our editors Ian Johnson, Hi i In, hi.
In, and our music was written for us by unwoman.
Yay.
So we are talking about San Francisco this week. We are talking about sex work in the American West or the Old West, or whatever we want to call it, and in particular we're talking about San Francisco. We have just talked about how around eighteen forty nine, thus the forty nine ers, a lot of people showed up in San Francisco and it went from not very many people to a lot more people, and it continued to have a red light district. It still does, but it's a
different one now. And so when the gold Rush first hit, the main women working there were Mexican, Chilean and Panamanian. Soon after white women showed up for work. Also Chinese women who were mostly not free, and we're going to talk about that in a bit. Most of the Chinese women who worked in San Francisco for several decades were trafficked.
To be honest, I wasn't sure if I was, Like, I was going to try and come up with a way to tell the script without having to talk about sex trafficking because most anti sex work campaign yeah, most anti sex work campaigners spread false information that implies the majority of sex workers in the United States are trafficked, we're working against their will. This is not the case, and anti sex trafficking laws are primarily used against women
who are working. Consentially, to my understanding, most of the women of the time that we're talking about were if they were driven to prostitution, and some of them describe
their work that way. It was because it was the only work available that paid women a living wage, And so many of them are very upfront that they're like, no, capitalism is why I do this job, right, and even would describe it that way, Like, in my mind, it's a very modern thing for Americans to actually have the courage to name capitalism as a economic system that is destructive.
But people who aren't afraid to be publicly sex workers aren't afraid of a lot of things, so they're naming that from the beginning, this fear that of sex trafficking has been used to criminalize and mistreat sex workers since basically forever. And there's this whole white slavery panic in the early twentieth century that, alongside the international anarchist movement, led to the development of international policing between EUROPEID nations and the US. And shit, these were the things that
international policing existed to stop, is white slavery. They didn't give a shit about all the fucking non white slaves. And then also like international political criminals, the anarchists, is.
This where the Comstock law came into.
No, that actually that predates that. We did an episode on that in early birth control pioneers. And Comstock was kind of in some ways, like the East Coast one of these folks in some ways. And he was a moral crusader who was like, I hate anything that might be sexy, so I'm going to stockpilot. I'm just gonna give me a jail. Yeah, and then I'm gonna fucking take photos and keep them in my archive of sexy things.
He was a total fucking piece of shit. PERV Like, be a PERV, but don't be a good closet PERV. Just do it. It's fine depending on your thing. In nineteen ten, you get what's called the Man Act. We'll come back to the trafficking stuff later, but first we're gonna talk about how it's been used, how anti trafficking
laws are used to hurt people. In nineteen ten, you get what's called the Man Act, which makes it a felony to transport any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose. Gotta love a law that says it is illegal to do immoral This is the vegus law I've ever and
the world is full of vague laws. It is mostly used at this point to criminalize interracial couples, especially black men who sleep with white women, like alumni of the pod Heavyweight Champion of the World, Jack Johnson at the first heavyweight boxer black heavyweight boxer of the world, and he was arrested under the Man Act for bringing his like I think wife to a different state. Oh, because it's immoral for a black man to sleep with a
white woman at this time. Right. Occasionally women sometimes get arrested for like trafficking themselves. I tried to look this up, but it's a very hard and vague thing to google. This is something I hear from sex worker friends. But it it created this situation where I was like, women were like not allowed to leave the states they were in essentially because you were like crossing state lines. And if you're not like.
Bringing my pussy with me, I guess yeah or whatever.
Yeah, well if you leave it at home, it might be okay. But and so you with man Act, you start getting this conspiracy theory that there's this huge international movement of brown people who steal white women into sexual slavery.
This is offensive on a million levels. One of those levels is that there was a real conspiracy, not a conspiracy, but there was a real criminal organization that was stealing of Chinese folks who are stealing other Chinese folks and transporting them into you know, it's like, but no one fucking gives a shit. I mean, some people give a shit about that, and we'll talk about it in a bit, But like I want to quote friend of the pod the Anarchists, feminist Emma Goldman, who's also in that Early
Birth Control Pioneers episode. She probably did some sex work herself. Her sex work was have you ever heard of it? I have no idea how common the story is. She's an early feminist activist who's part of the labor movement as an anarchist, and at one point she probably does sex work and it's to raise money to buy her boyfriend a gun so that she can so you can shoot an industrialist who's like killing the striking workers.
I had not heard that, but when you said friend of the pod, I was thinking, like, oh, you know, are contemporary not like this?
Oh yeah, yeah, No, no, no, no, just someone who's been on the podcast before. And she like shows up all kinds of places. Obviously, sometimes I go looking for it because I think she's cool. But I didn't go looking for her this time. It's just like she comes up more than once in this story because she's just part of this stuff. And so she has a quote about the Man Act. What is really the cause of the trade in women, not merely white women, but yellow
and black women as well. Exploitation of course, the merciless moloch of capitalism that fattens on underpaid labor, thus driving thousands of women and girls into prostitution. And so again there's this exception to the no large organized groups stealing people into sexual slavery and that is the early Chinese American prostitution, which worked in the form of indenture that absolutely amounted to sex slavery. US law can be blamed
for most of this. I think US law made the situation ripe for the ex sploitation of Chinese immigrant women because even before the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty two that explicitly banned Chinese men from bringing their wives to the States because the US wants Yeah, the the US is fucking evil. The US wants their labor right, they're building the railroads, doing all this shit, but they do not want their permanent residence right, So don't bring
your family over. And the way that they would keep people from bringing family over before eventually just making it illegal for you to bring your family was by keeping wages low for Chinese workers so that they couldn't afford to bring their families. And that was a conscious thing that like bosses and shit were doing. Plus all of the anti Chinese violence that was happening those very common meant that people didn't want to bring their families over.
They're like, I am going into this lawless, horrible, scary place called the United States of America to try and make some money digging gold. I will send it back to my family. You know, I'll be back when I can, right, So, the ratio of men to women in the Chinese immigrant community was very high. In eighteen fifty, there were four thousand, twenty five Chinese folks in San Francisco, seven of them were women. What yeah, And a lot of what you read about this whole thing blames it on like Chinese
patriarchy or whatever, right, which is part of it. Patriarchy is part of it, and its specific Chinese characteristics, you know, cultural characteristics. But other sources make it clear those nativism and capitalism working together against Chinese immigrants that laid this groundwork for on free labor. So for Chinese women from around the countryside were kidnapped or lured or sold into indenture. Researcher Lucy chang Harata basically compares the American pre capitalist
model of work with the Chinese semi feudal model. So instead of a business arrangement between adam and worker, it was fundamentally unfree. In the Western world, prostitutes were quote fallen women, whereas from the Chinese perspective, they were women obeying the orders of their family. But before anyone gets on too high of a horse about this, the West has a model for women who are forced to obey of their family too, the orders of their family, and
that's called marriage. Things have changed culturally now, but it is not a free arrangement at this time right in the United States, to be a married woman. We've already talked about one woman who started doing sex work at her husband's assistance and for his profit, and I read a whole lot more about people doing that in this episode.
This is not good. But what I'm trying to say is that because this thing that we're talking about leads to a lot of anti Chinese bigotry, you know, so I want to be like real clear.
That what part of it? What do you mean, how did it lead to the bigotry?
So a lot of anti Chinese bigotry at the time would focus on the fact that there was this sexual
slavery happening to be like these people culturally bad, immoral? Yeah, yeah, like keep everyone out, continue the situation that actually makes this happen by criminalizing people like there was actually a couple of years from eighteen forty nine to eighteen fifty four where Chinese women worked freely in San Francisco, but by eighteen fifty four, Chinese secret society called Tongs, basically mafia's, managed to get a monopoly on the whole thing, and
for seven decades, sexual slavery was big business in San Francisco. And this got all kinds of people rich, well, not all kinds, mostly men, although some women did run these things too.
Did anybody get out of their indentured servitude? Like, did they get their freedom?
Yeah? Okay, well, so it's funny. I read this whole thirty page academic paper about the specific conditions that they were dealing with, and it talked about how, on average the women ended up working for about four or five years on average for their indenture. A lot of them. That average is low because they died, right, A lot of women died as a result of this. There are stories that are potentially apocryphal about I'm trying to focus
on the really horrible shit. A lot of them died, a lot of them were killed when they were no longer useful, and a lot of them died of all kinds of horrible bat shit. Yeah, but some of them did complete their indenture and go on. But more of them. I don't know more of them. A lot of them also got out by running away or being rescued, and we'll talk about some of those people in a little bit. This is the darkest part of the whole thing of
this particular episode. So White landlords made a fucking ton of money off of this. They would charge Chinese like brothels, two to three times what they would charge anyone else, and they would and of course customs officials were being bribed constantly to get people into the country. And so the indenture is ostensibly I do this long enough and
you'll be free. This is often a lie. The different there's like a couple there's like four or five contracts that have been found like specific language of this is what your contract is, and there's a lot of like conjecture and a lot of different ways that it worked in different situations. The women often became debt slaves, basically unable to pay for the fees incurred and smuggling them
to the States. They even had to pay the wages of the kidnapper, and their contractors would say things like you have to work three hundred and twenty days of the year or your contract will extend automatically another year, but sick days don't count. Menstruating counts as a sick day. If you got pregnant, they would just like tack a year onto your fucking contract, and some ended up just
trapped into perpetual labor their entire lives. So eventually the politicians slowly swung into action because they were racist the Chinese job the Chinese slaves were stealing jobs from white women. That was their fucking complaint.
What.
Yeah, because when there's no like like sleeping with people to be had, they would like do seamstress work and so like they're like stealing jobs because they're because they charged less, because they're.
Anyway whatever to take less wages.
Yeh, my god. Yeah, which is I mean that gets reflected to in the way that immigrant white labor was turned against newly freed black labor in the wake of the Civil War, where they were like these people worked for basically nothing because they had just recently worked for nothing.
You know.
This was used as the main argument against Chinese immigrants in the US for a very long time, as if Chinese immigrants weren't the main people who suffered at then of these organized criminal syndicates racist laws. This is going
to shock you. Didn't stop the problem. The Chinese Exclusion Act of I think eighteen eighty two forbade bringing women over like more explicitly, right, And this did slow down the importation of women, but it didn't stop it, and it made corrupt officials even more rich, and it led to Chinese Americans being trafficked as well. The earlier the first couple of generations are only taken from China, and now people are being captured in the United States as well.
Why because it's illegal if you're already over here.
So no, why they didn't from the beginning?
Well, yeah, why did that like encourage this trafficking of them later?
I think overall, I think most of the women who were taken in China and girls who were taken in China, a lot of it was like arrangements with family. A lot of it was the family says, you are going to go do this, going to pay this indenture, or you are going to pay this indenture and send money back to us. Right, So people weren't there. There isn't a reason to do that with someone who is already in America, right because they're not necessarily part of that.
I think this is like I read a little bit about this, so it's like half what I read and half me trying to put the pieces together. But basically, once it was no longer profitable or like possible to get the numbers of people you needed from China, well where are we going to get Chinese women? We're like, well, now there's Chinese women here too, because there's people who grew up here, right, Okay, So what was more effective than the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was explicitly a racist
law at stopping this violence? Was also friend of the pod the concept of direct action, which is today's sponsor. If you have a problem, thank you, Thank you. If you have a problem, sometimes appealing to authorities and waiting for them to solve the problem is less effective than collectively with your friends and your community, looking into what
those solutions are and doing it. Much like people drove the hounds out of San Francisco, you too can solve problems by the application of direct action, and then whatever other ads are just as good as direct action, just.
As effective, just like capitalism is known for, yeah, go for it.
Effective solutions to all of life life problems, assuming your problem is you don't have a new car. Here's ads and we're back. So some other folks worked way more directly to rescue these women, most notably the women themselves, who often escaped and they would get chased by tongue enforcers.
Sometimes men would fall in love with them, and I guess it's like one of those things where, like, I mean, men falling in love with these often prove very bad, but sometimes it's actually very nice, right, They're actually very wonderful people, and so sometimes men would fall in love with them and then buy them their freedom. Right. Other women try to get in on the action too. Overall, the anti vice crusading hurt sex workers, and we're gonna talk a little bit more about that than the last
chunk of what we're gonna talk about today. But sometimes it was justified and fucking cool, because it turns out it's not the selling of sex sex part that's bad. It's the fucking slavery part that's the bad part. Yeah, sometimes I'm like, I guess, so, like these seem really obvious to me, Like not all moral problems are obvious,
but like this one seems obvious to me. I'm with you, in eighteen seventy five, five women opened the Presbyterian Women's Occidental Board of Foreign Missions, which is a long and fancy name for a safe house. They actually formed the organization two years earlier, but like the thing they did with it is in eighteen seventy five they opened this safe house or a rescue I believe they called it
a rescue mission. A woman with a single best name in history, Margaret in this case, Margaret Colbertson, organized a home for escaping Chinese women. One of the most prominent organizers and rescuers at this place was a woman named tianfu Wu who had been born in China. She actually managed to get sold into servitude twice before she was an adult non sexual servitude. Oh, I know, it's like one of those like oh okay, and you're like wait,
hold on, but it's like still like whatever. Anyway, she was sold into servitude as a child, and then she was like rescued by some lady. This part. I read a couple of articles about this person in a trunk of a book, but like didn't have enough detail. And then she like wound up working unfree as a domestic servant in a brothel in the San Francisco while still a child, and she was absolutely physically tormented and has
scars and stuff about it. So she was rescued again, and this time she was rescued by the Presbyterians, who would just lead raids on mafia controlled spaces. Shout out to early feminists for being fucking brave, and so she grew up in the rescue alongside other rescued girls. They I think paid for her to go off to college, and then she came back and kept working at the rescue and she did two things a lot, and one of them is that she interpreted Cantonese for Chinese women
who were in court. Because whenever, it's like whenever women would get rescued, the people who claim to own them would show up in court and be like, we want this woman back. But they would they couldn't be like, but we have this slavery thing going on. They had to instead be like.
We own her, so can you just give her back?
Yeah, And so they had to be like, she stole close when she left or whatever, like you know, like the clothes or whatever the fuck. And so this is one of the this is some of the work that this woman did was to interpret and the other thing that she did was break into brothels and rescue people. Hey, thousands of girls and women were rescued by this organization.
All kinds of different numbers are presented. It seems to be somewhere between two and six thousand were like personally rescued by like a small clique of women who did this work regularly over the course of decades, which is a not insubstantial part of like the total number of indentured women in San Francisco. Like it seems like a fucking I am making this number entirely up. Well, I've read some numbers and I'm making bad math out of it.
It's like a twenty five percent chance that you're getting rescued by this organization. Oh, like they like were incredibly impactful. It gets blurry because no one's perfect in anyway. It get's annoying, But anyway, I'll talk about the moment. So she ends up working in this organization. She would also vet potential husbands for the girls to make sure they weren't like going to like kidnap them again or whatever,
and also to make sure they were Christian. And her cool quote is people asked when she was going to get married, and she responded to say that men are only useful when it's time to move furniture.
Good for her. Yeah.
Another woman rescuing folks out of the mission was Donald Dina Cameron, a white woman born in New Zealand who earned the name the Angry Angel of Chinatown. So this rescue mission is cool as shit and overall like really fucking in the balance, right, but I hate that I have to do this in the balance thing. Rescue girls were forced to convert to Christianity and Christians and yeah, I know, like why can't people just be good for the sake of being good? Like yeah, looking, God forbid?
And then some of them ended up contracted out as like fruit pickers in northern California by the Mish.
My god, you guys.
Yeah. And their argument was because they're Protestants, right, so idle hands do the devil's work, because they're trying to instill Protestant values, like a Protestant work ethic into these girls, as if these girls are lazy whatever. I'm so angry about this part. But it's like kind of another form of slavery, right it it is, but it's way the fuck more temporary. You're talking about like probably a couple months, and you're talking about like it it's do good, ORSM
doing bad. But it's like as far as I can tell, and actually many women actually just escaped.
Again.
Many women were like cool, we're out of here, fuck
this and took off right. But they yeah, they were like get taught to read and write, and they get converted and forced converted to Christianity, and they would often end up doing like four to eight weeks of work as contract workers to teach them the value of hard work, and then they'd be free and like and they seem to actually mean it, and then a lot of I believe I've only had the names of two Chinese workers at this place, but I ask only have the names
of three white workers at this place. I don't know what the overall balance was, but a woman named Yamanda Waka ended upset, eventually left and set up a similar institution in Japan for other unfree sex workers.
We'll take it, I guess, but yeah, yeah, try harder.
And I don't like totally know, you know. I was like, like I read that that was the length of their contract as fruit pickers. I don't know how long. Like obviously some girls are like growing up there, right, I don't know if there until they turn eighteen. I don't know if they're there till they're married. That's my guess is it's like until one of the two happens. But
I I'm not sure someone does know. There's entire books written about this, and I have one week to research and credit whatever anyway, preemptively being defensive for people who know more about these things. So the end of the red Light District. Usually don't read my little section heads, but I didn't have a good transition, so I'll just read that little section head in the script. People probably know that I read from a script and then I fall off script.
Sorry, guys, be really fucking cool if you did not have a script though, that that brilliant.
I feel bad for people who ask me the details about stuff like three weeks from now, because like, I'm like, it's gone three subjects later, you know, Yeah, I remember
the broad strokes most of the time. Around the turn of the twentieth century, people were like, what if we got rid of the red Light District and then conflate everything that happens there from murder non consensual sex work to being the same as consensual sex work and consensual homosexuality and drug use and women having fun, and we'll call it all crime.
Okay, yeah, it's not true.
So that's what they did. San Francisco got its longest serving mayor in nineteen eleven, a boring guy named Sonny Jim, Yeah, who owned a shipping company and oversaw two different banks. Could you imagine the business card where you go into one of the two banks and they both have little business cards that are like sunny Jim, like like a audience can't see me smiling, But it's gross and scary. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? Just on the bad side? On the balance, not my favorite. He
didn't like people having fun. He also didn't like women having basic fucking rights. Because all of the anti sex work claws that we're going to talk about, like the Man Act that prevents white women from sleeping with black men, all of the anti sex work while is that we're going to talk about just affect all women. I mean, obviously they most directly affects sex workers. But I just it's like, how well in a way I put that
later in the script, Okay. So, uh, it's so aggravating to me that a bunch of suffer jests and first wait, feminists were caught up in this anti vice shit because it's so transparent how it plays out is the destruction of women's lives and freedom. It's it's, ah, here's what I already. Yeah, I got right to the point I was going to make earlier. It's like, how you have all these supposed feminists now working alongside literal Nazis to
drive trans women out of public life. Yeah. One common knock on effect of the current thing that's happening is that like butch CIS women, or tall SIS women or old CIS women, or just any woman who doesn't look properly SIS can get run out of bathrooms and changing rooms and shit. Yeah, and you've got people who want to inspect people's genitals all the time, including children hobby. I know, My god, I know. And this ties directly
back in anti sex work stuff. The earliest sex work laws were involved a lot of genital inspection on a regular basis and bribery and shit. So in this campaign against vice, the city of San Francisco makes it illegal for women to go to or work at any bar in the Red Light district. Okay, yeah, so sorry, no drinking or dancing for you, because drinking at a bar is the same as doing sex work morally, which is the same as being forced into doing sex work morally. According to people.
What are they going to do at the bar? It's like you're almost encouraging it, you know what I mean, You're like, no women can come here, except there will be the women that do. I don't know, it's yeah, this whole circular thing.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And like okay, well now I can't work as a waitress. Well what kind of work can I do? You know? In nineteen thirteen, So this past is nineteen thirteen one of the only good jobs in town, which doesn't even involve fucking anyone, like saloon dancing and shit,
it's just suddenly gone. This doesn't even this law doesn't close the brothels, just the dance halls, and temperance is sweeping the nation, and soon enough, villains of the Pod the KKK would become the armed wing of the anti vice movement. This is something I didn't realize about the KKK until I did a series of episodes about them, is that the KKK were obviously their primary thing was
the destruction of black freedom in the United States. But while they were at it, especially the second wave of the KKK, there's three waves or four depending on you, we'll look at it. The second wave that restarted nineteen fifteen was very waspy and very nativist, and so a lot of their enemies were actually immigrant Catholics as well as black people. And one of the things that they were is they were the armed enforcers for the Temperance Movement.
You drink in your moonshining, the KKK is going to try and rough you up, which is so yeah.
Sober Hell's Angels or something, Yeah.
Yeah, totally yeah, like and so I just feel like that's like worth knowing who the bedfellows of the Temperance movement are, right, yeah, And this is coming all of my hatred of this Temperance movement comes from someone who I don't drink. I think drugs are overall really shitty and like most people should probably avoid them. I think gambling is one of the least entertaining ways to end up broke. Those are personal choices that adults make about
their own lives. You know, the woman's Christian Temperance Movement are the main villains of this temperance movement from my point of view. They are of course opposed to all alcohol and drugs. They are also opposed to all sex work, and they forgot that it's actually very easy to be personally committed to a healthy lifestyle without wanting to put people into cages for having a different opinion than your own. Easiest thing in the world. It's harder to put people
in cages than not. They managed to get sex work criminalized in most US states between nineteen ten and nineteen fifteen. And to be clear, while they're the Christian Women's Women's Christian Temperance Union, this is not all types of Christians. This is Evangelical Christians. And so sometimes i'm a little bit broad with the like Protestant complaint brush, but like, this is Evangelicals, not even all Protestants or whatever.
Right.
They were tied into the suffrage movement. I'm not trying to say all suffragettes were into this, but it was a very big part of it. They were into voting rights for women, which helped the temperance movement dramatically. The fact that we get prohibition right when women get the right to vote is not a coincidence.
Oh I didn't realize that. Yeah.
Interesting, Yeah, And like it comes from like a lot of it comes from this, like, well, men are shitty when they're drunk sometimes, right, you know, and so like it's a legitimate feminist thing to be like we want men to be drinking less, right.
I don't want them to blow the whole paycheck or whatever.
Yeah, but more of it was about a larger chunk of the evangelical like temperance movement was women. So when women get the right to vote, that dramatically impacts things in certain ways. And that is like someone's going to complain that I'm like saying that women should have the right to voteor whatever. Like it's just everything's fucking complicated. And also they're also into labor rights, the women's women's Christian temperance whatever.
Full of contradictions.
I know exactly in the eighteen seventies they've been around. God, they're still around.
Actually.
I think in the eighteen seventies they would go in like pray for and harass customers at saloons, kind of the way that like anti choice people do today. Outside of like clinics, right, they would just like hang out and yell at people for drinking.
You know.
They worked really hard to Americanize immigrants from Germany and other like white countries to convince them how real Americans don't drink that like American this is that wasp culture that like is so mad at white immigrant culture. And this is like part of the hatred of Catholics is that they drink.
You know.
Also everyone has to learn English according to them. Also, they protested against Christians who drank wine like at church, like like literally the sacrament of drinking the blood of Jesus Christ. Yeah, so that you could have your eternal soul saved or whatever the fuck, because no way would Jesus's blood have alcohol in it because alcohol is a poison and Jesus is the savior. Okay, So, like they
piss off all the I think Episcopals and Catholics. I can't remember who else besides Catholics is a into the blood drinking cult. Anyway they're interested in, they're not cool. In nineteen thirteen, California past what's called the Red Light Abatement Acts, and these are modeled on anti liquor laws from the Midwest, and this act what it does is it holds property owners financially responsible for the nuisance of people performing like sexual labor for money, because at its core,
sex work is performing labor for money. But it's a nuisance somehow. And Okay, there's a there's a meme that perfectly sums up how I think about sex work that a sex work a friend of mine sends me. And you know those like exploding head memes, was like the brain gets bigger and bigger, is the thoughts get bigger and bigger at the like the top, Like the lowest thought is sex work is sex and sex is bad, And then it goes up to sex work is sex and sex is good, and then it goes to sex
work is work and work is good. And then you get the logical conclusion that I think any worthwhile analysis comes to, which is sex work is work and work is bad is bad. Yeah, And I don't know, it's shitty that people trade their bodies for money, You're right, temperance union. It's also shitty with coal mining. And it's shitty when it's sitting in a chair sixty hours a week,
and it's shitty when it's fucking people. It work is shitty, But you know what isn't shitty is spending the money you make by selling your time spending it on stuff like why that stuff, this stuff, whatever it is, it'll make you happy. See it's so sexy. Whatever this is, it's just sexy as hell. Imagine No, I actually, I don't want anyone to imagine any of us with anything as relates to this. Imagine someone else with this stuff.
Sex.
God, damn it, here's master.
You're gonna feel so sexy when you have this stuff.
Thank you, thank you, And we're back so at the same time, in this temperance union and stuff is doing it's bad shit. A bunch of really cool shit starts happening about women talking about their experiences with work in a way that I don't think had been quite so publicly part of the American public conversation. In nineteen sex work, sorry, well as sex work as relates to wages for other work.
But yeah. So in nineteen thirteen, there's this newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, and it started telling the sex workers side of the story. They were running memoir essays from a woman named Alice Smith, and to quote the San Francisco Gate from a modern article about this quote. She may have been a Midwestern farmer girl as she claimed
lord to California by the siren song of opportunity. She may have been a few women whose collective stories were combined for a single narrative, or maybe she didn't exist at all. But in nineteen thirteen, there was no doubt about one thing. She was the most famous woman in San Francisco and the way her her stories were told.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, people, what happened is that this woman, the sex worker, would come in and dictate, or she would tell her story to a ghost writer on staff, who would then type it up and publish it. And this ran for i want to say, about two months. And this was like the biggest fucking press deal. And it's like and the paper's doing it a little bit because it's like, oh we care, and it's doing a lot of bit because like, oh, this sells some fucking papers. This, yeah,
this sells fucking papers. People love sex work stories.
Yeah, yeah, who's the horn now, baby?
So she wrote about how she became a sex worker. She wasn't kidnapped, and she was laid low by capitalism. She moved out to the Bay and she worked a series of shitty jobs, getting yelled at, getting called ungrateful for working. She worked like two months and earned three dollars, you know, And eventually she found her way to sex work. As she put it, quote, evidently, a prostitute is one
who sold herself for money. Well, I wondered, was there anybody in the world, according to that, who didn't sell herself or himself for money? Yes, And her memoirs open up a floodgates and over four thousand letters get sent from sex workers to the San Francisco Chronicle, which published
about three hundred of them. And the letters describe the author's own circumstances, how Christian families had left them on their street, whether like kicks them out of the house, whether for doing sex work or for simply for having sex before marriage. And there are so many good quotes in these letters.
I want to read them all. Oh my god, this sounds fascinating. They're like, I'm sick of working at Walmart. I'm sorry. Yeah, like now I do sex work, Yeah, totally. Like quote, why do you speak of us as belonging to the underworld? Who then constitutes the upper world? Is it the men who come to visit us? And why are they in any respect above us? Is the woman who marries for money or for social station any better than we are? Doesn't she not sell herself as well?
Yeah? They just like people are dumb. They know what's happening to them, you know.
Yeah.
And hero of the pod Emma Goldman, my personal friend, Emma Goldman, who I regularly communicate with.
That's what I thought.
The birth control activist. She shows up in nineteen thirteen and she's basically like, she gives a talk. She you know, she's an orator. She goes around and gives speeches about issues of the day and stuff. Because there's no podcast, so people had to go see people talk in person. And she was like, these letters fucking rule, and she talked about them a bunch at the talk. She was like this, this is this is good, this is great.
And supposedly Alice, if she's a real person, she was in the audience and happy to hear her work recognized, and the next time she went in she was like, oh, when saw I'm a Goldman talk, this rules, you know. But not everyone was happy to support the sex workers with fifty three percent of the vote, the Red Light Abatement Act passed. I don't know if that's fifty three percent of like the state Congress, or if it was a ballot measure.
I don't know. Initially is Christian temperance ladies that are yeah, well they can't vote yet. Actually, oh, this is nineteen thirteen. When did women get the right to vote? I want to say, nineteen eighteen. Oh God, I'm a history podcaster, Do do do do? When did women get the right to vote?
Nineteen nineteen? Ratified in nineteen twenty. Yeah, so initially this law passes the nuisance law for you know, sex work or whatever, and it's not enforced. So some folks got really fussy about that. And by that I mean a bunch of right wing grifters did their grifty thing and got rich off of complaining at great length about sexy sexy win There is his asshole. His name is Reverend
Paul Smith of Central Methodist Church. He was the kind of guy who stays up late at night, unable to rest because he's so bothered by the fact that women danced in public places, like literally as courts where he was like and they dance. Yeah. Yeah, he's so bothered. He's not just bothered by the strippers, Uh, he's bothered by women existing and dancing. He missed Jesus's lying about if thine eye offends the pluck it out and was like,
if thine I offends the hurt women. And like the first couple accounts I read about this guy, it it talks about him as if he's just like going to his church and complaining right to his congregants, which is like shitty, but like whatever, on some level, I don't know. No, this guy is a lecturer and he is selling out halls like thousands of tickets at a time, again giving talks, good way to it whatever.
Oh my god, it is a grift Jesus Christ.
And he's rallying against sex worker. He's rallying, railing against sex workers the whole time, and in these talks he gets kind of graphic. He goes on and on about how bad these loose women are, gets into some detail, so a lot of the audience would leave and go find sex workers.
Tire, I love that he's doing like audio erotica.
Yeah, and so sex workers start hanging out nearby when he does talks because it's a good way to get work his bullshit fucking sermons. And he would go around and tour these various dance halls to uh see the proof of the corruption and sin, you know, like just fucking hire sex workers, bro, Like you clearly want to treat them, well, you don't deserve to.
Dick, right. He's like, you know, one of those congressmen who's like getting blown in the bathroom and doing all the bills where he says it should be illegal.
Yeah. Absolutely, he's so fucking bad. And some of the things that he and his fellow temperance folks complained about included women drinking alcohol, liquors sold without meals, women dancing with strangers, and one angry headline was just women free with smiles.
What a hater?
I know, just funny because now we have this whole thing we were trying to not get told to smile, Like, now everyone wants us to smile, whicheverone controls us.
That's what they want women to do.
That's the thing. Women doing something I didn't give them permission to do. What the fuck?
Yeah.
So his campaigning and among others, but I think he was the most prominent was finally going to get the red light of Bateman Act and forced with the set date of Valentine's Day nineteen seventeen. Because nothing says love like evicting a ton of women from their homes at
the same time as you take their jobs away. Most of them are single mothers, because women tended to live in the brothels, right, And so he called for a big meeting for everyone in his movement on January twenty fifth, nineteen seventeen, which is for an event he called a Purity Sunday, which I had to google and apparently is still.
A thing, horribly named thing.
Yes, and what he got instead on January twenty fifth, nineteen seventeen was the first known sex workers' rights protest in US history. Yeah, there's a madam named Reggie Gamble who called up and was like, look, let's talk. You say you want to help women, how about you hear from us. I'll come over and I'll tell you what our life is really like. And he said, yes, of course he did. He is fucking obsessed with sex workers.
He also, on some level, I don't know, a lot of the articles try to like paint him as like actually caring. I'm not convinced. No, she doesn't show up alone. She shows up with three hundred other workers, white and black, working together. I wasn't able to figure out Reggie's race, though my impression was actually had a comadam who may or may not have been her lesbian partner.
Oh but I'm.
Getting into conjecture land. If Margaret says someone was a lesbian and I'm not providing the receipts, it's.
Just pure fantasy.
I think, slightly informed. You know, I spent a lot of time reading this shit, but yeah, totally so so. Reggie Gamble to get ready for this had been working alongside some women who worked for the San Francisco Bulletin Chronicle, which everyone was the one that did the thing. I think I wrote it wrong in my script here the paper those publishing sex were accounts. Two of the staff writers helped her write a speech right because she was, you know, very good at talking about things right, but
not necessarily a writer. And one of the women who helped her write this this is the weirdest shout out I'm ever going to do on this show was a woman named Rose Wilder Lane, who went on to become an early American libertarian party activist and a committed anti racist activism anti racism activist. The rare libertarian win on this show, but credit where it's due. Libertarians have always been good about sex worker rights, not about labor rights
more broadly anyway. Whatever, So Rose Wilder Lane helps her write write this speech. So they show up to the church and Reggie Gamble goes up to the pulpit and she gives a speech that was very explicit that this is a labor demonstration. They were very clear that they were fighting for their rights as labor activists. I want to quote the author Kim Kelly from her book Fight Like Hell, which if you like the show, you will like the book Fight Like Hell. It isn't entertaining.
Kim Kelly, I know the fucking best.
Yeah, the labor columnist for teen Vogue, Like, you can't go wrong with Kim Kelly.
Kim's amazing, just amazing.
Puts on a bunch of metal shows. It all ties back together. So this is a quote from her book Fight Like Hell. She swept past him and strode straight up to the pulpit, where her words made clear that this was a labor demonstration and that these workers had gathered to discuss wages in their own social and economic oppression.
They were not there to convince hard hearted reformers the morality of their profession, but were instead there to castigate them for their own role in perpetuating the conditions that left sex workers poor and desperate. You want the city cleaned up around your church, but where do you want the women to go, she asked him. Men here in San Francisco say they want to eradicate vice. If they do, they better give up something of their dividends and pay the girl's wages that so they can live.
Yes.
Yeah, Basically they were like, look, if you want to eradicate sex worker, your sex work, you need to start by lobbying for higher wages and more educational higher wages for tru other forms of work, and better educational opportunities.
And then they're like, wait a minute, just kidding, just do the sex work.
Yeah, totally. They're like, actually, we just have a punishment kink. We think that wages are too high for sex workers, and we figure if we criminalize it'll go anyway. No, that's even more cynical. Okay. Another quote is one of the girls told me that her brother a methodist minister when she applied for help to him only told her to trust in God. You can't trust in God when shoes are ten dollars a pair and wages are six dollars a week. And I just like fucking love that line.
Amen.
She also had fun pointing out how clearly he didn't give a shit about Jesus because Jesus was actually pretty good friends with sex workers, and that the protest wasn't successful. It's stopping the red light law. The red light law went through on February fourteenth, fourteen hundred women were thrown out of their homes and jobs. At the same time, three quarters of the sex workers were single mothers, so it's extra cool to evict them and take away their jobs.
And the reverend guy the asshole, went on to say the day was the most dramatic incident of his life. He did start working towards minimum wage laws, but he never stopped his anti sex work zealotry. Meanwhile, once this law goes into place, brothel became basically defined as a woman rents this place without a man. So now women can't run anywhere to live by themselves. Thanks wrong, It's
called the studio apartment buck an asshole. One hundred years later, on the anniversary, sex worker staged a protest on the steps of the same church with many of the same demands. But one thing that changed. We talked about this at the very top of all of it. One thing that
changes sex workers are more organized now. The three groups that put together this particular protest was the Erotic Service Providers Union, the Sex Workers Outreach Project or SWAP, and the US Prostitutes Collective prose is all capitalized because you know, they call themselves pros And so these three groups organize this new protest. What's this era that we're oh, yeah, sorry, twenty seventeen, one hundred years later on the centennial. Basically
they recreated this protest, which is fucking cool. And this protest in nineteen seventeen was the first sex worker protest I'm aware of in the US, but as far from the last. I hope we'll cover more of the more recent organizing andcluding some of the stuff that you brought up at the top of the show, the strikes and the collectivization and all of that in the future. Yeah, but that's my sex work in the American West, and
there's so much more. I feel like, honestly, there's there's just so so much more, and so people should take.
A love that the successful unionization efforts have happened on the West coast. Yeah, the Lusty Lady in SF and then now the Stargarden Dancers in North Hollywood.
Yeah, totally. And if folks are like curious, like what's going on and like all the stuff that like we're talking about about, like decriminalization and all that, like, well, what's the deal?
You know?
I I but I'd heard all this stuff. I really recommend well reading and hearing from sex workers. I would recommend the SWAP the Sex Worker Outreach Project project as like one of the most well together, like public facing sources of information, because if you think you don't know any sex workers, it just means that you don't know anyone who's had who's told you out. Yeah.
Strippers United is also an organization that's doing really good work. They have a fascinating Instagram and they have been a part of how the Stargarden Dancers were able to unionize and gave them a lot of information that helped support that. So they're a cool organization too.
Hell yeah, well that's what we got but what you might got is a thing where you tell people about yourself. Here at the end.
End of the podcast, check out Private Parts Unknown. I also love to talk about sex work on that show. And I have another podcast called podcast Bestie about making podcasts, and a podcast called The Blea Readers about book writing and publishing. So check out my podcast obsession.
These are many of my interests that you're listening. If you want to hear hear me right, it is not hearing you. Most of what you do is hearing. But the thing I'm about to say isn't I have a substack like every other podcaster that somehow also has a substack, But mine's better than anyone else's, with the exception of Roberts from cool Zone Media. And then once Jamie Loftus starts a substack, that one will also be good or
better for sure. I heard Jamie mention that she might have to start a substack after complaining about substecks, So
that's my challenge to her. I write every week about history and preparedness and a bunch of other topics, and then every other well half of them are free in public and the other half are more personal and are like memoir and journal and stuff like that, and those you have to pay me because if you want to see inside my head for the stuff that isn't what I'm trying to say to the world, then you can give me some money to do so, and then I can spend it on food that I feed my dog,
who is a great dog, because I'm also a dog mom.
Sophie, what's your substack called?
Oh, it's technically the titles Birds before the Storm, but it's just Margaret Kildoy dot substock dot com.
You gotta check it out.
Hell, yeah, Sophe, what you got, soph You get a substack yet?
I know.
I wanna plug two episodes that PROP did on hood politics that are called y'alled outside my check or Marinate my Chicken, And it's just talking through some of some Supreme Court stuff that I think is really important.
So you should definitely check those out.
Buck Yeah, and we will see you next Monday with more Cool People Did Cool Stuff. Bye Bye.
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