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"An exciting and beautiful story." —Ottessa Moshfegh
The collected memoirs of a 1913 San Francisco sex worker, their effect on society at the time, and where they fit in today's world.
Winner of the 2015 California Historical Society Book Award
In 1913 the San Francisco Bulletin published a serialized, ghostwritten memoir of a prostitute who went by the moniker Alice Smith. "A Voice from the Underworld" detailed Alice's humble Midwestern upbringing and her struggle to find aboveboard work, and it candidly related the harrowing events she endured after entering "the life." Never had prostitute narratives been as frank in their discussion of topics such as abortion, police corruption, and the unwritten laws of the brothel. The response to Alice's story was unprecedented: Four thousand letters poured into the Bulletin, many of which were written by other prostitutes ready to share their own stories; and it inspired what may have been the first sex worker rights protest in modern history.
With Alice, filmmakers and writers Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus present the memoirs of Alice Smith and a selection of letters her story elicited. In an introduction contextualizing Alice's story, they reveal themes that extend from Alice's experience in the early twentieth century to issues facing sex workers today. This edition features a new preface detailing the discoveries made about this history since the book's original publication in 2016.
Winner of the 2015 California Historical Society Book Award
Ivy Anderson (they/she) and Devon Angus (he/him) are San Francisco–based writers, historians, and filmmakers. Their book, Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute (Heyday, 2016) won the California Historical Society’s 2015 Book Award. Their filmic adaptation, "Maiden Lane," was awarded a Berkeley Film Foundation Grant and as of early 2026 is in post-production. Anderson's experimental films have been screened at several festivals, and Anderson was awarded the Dina Ciraulo Experimental Film Scholarship in 2025. Angus has organized and published oral histories of immigrants in New York's Catskills region. He received a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts for his show Songs and Stories of Old New York.