Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, the
Speaker 1: podcast that I can't make the same joke introduction to
Speaker 1: twice in a row, so I can't talk about adjectives,
Speaker 1: and then I feel like I don't know how to
Speaker 1: It's a show about cool people in history. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Margaret Kiljoy, and your guest today for all of this
Speaker 1: week is Courtney Cosack.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's me. Hi, guys, nice, Nice to be back.
Speaker 1: Courtney is a most importantly a dog mom, but also
Speaker 1: is an compulsive podcaster. Sometimes records podcasts walking around the
Speaker 1: house into a Zoom microphone and then they don't even
Speaker 1: go anywhere because no one has the heart to tell
Speaker 1: her that it is not recording.
Speaker 2: Oh you're talking shit. I have a podcast about making podcasts,
Speaker 2: so that would be really bad if I was so
Speaker 2: terrible at it.
Speaker 1: Wait, what's your podcast by making podcasts?
Speaker 2: Podcast bestie?
Speaker 1: Oh well, that that makes sense. Yeah. I've probably said
Speaker 1: this on air before, but I once had a stress
Speaker 1: stream where I had to tell someone I was a
Speaker 1: podcaster because I like, I'm kind of obsessively honest, and
Speaker 1: someone's like, what do you do for a living, And
Speaker 1: I was like, I'm a podcaster.
Speaker 2: I know it is kind of a weird thing, like
Speaker 2: when I'm just have to admit it to someone random,
Speaker 2: like I'm getting a blowout or something, and then it's
Speaker 2: a weird thing to talk about.
Speaker 3: Try and try being me explaining to men on dating
Speaker 3: apps what you do for a living.
Speaker 2: I try.
Speaker 3: I try being honest about it. I try giving them
Speaker 3: the most straightforward version of it. I try dumbing it down.
Speaker 2: I try like basically lying that.
Speaker 3: It's still They're like, oh uh, can you tell me
Speaker 3: what you do?
Speaker 2: And I'm like, I fucking just did.
Speaker 1: Or they like, like give successful podcast networks in the
Speaker 1: fucking world.
Speaker 3: It's very confusing. It's very confusing for them. But you're blonde, Yeah, like,
Speaker 3: what what do you mean there's the bleach in your hair?
Speaker 2: What?
Speaker 3: Yeah, sorry, I just vented.
Speaker 2: I'm Sophie. I'm the producer. Yep.
Speaker 1: But see, you do a respectable job podcast producer. That
Speaker 1: is a respectable line of work, because that automatically clears
Speaker 1: the air that there's like money involved.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, totally. Otherwise what if? What if? What
Speaker 2: if they're like, what do you do for a living?
Speaker 2: I've secured the bag?
Speaker 1: Uh, I catfish and rob people on Tinder.
Speaker 2: What do you do for Yeah? Oh my god. Well,
Speaker 2: if you've been listening to this series, you know that
Speaker 2: cute boys, Yeah, the enemy of their existence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we we we cannot allow this to go
Speaker 3: on any further.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Our editors Ian Johnson, Hi i In, hi.
Speaker 1: In, and our music was written for us by unwoman.
Speaker 2: Yay.
Speaker 1: So we are talking about San Francisco this week. We
Speaker 1: are talking about sex work in the American West or
Speaker 1: the Old West, or whatever we want to call it,
Speaker 1: and in particular we're talking about San Francisco. We have
Speaker 1: just talked about how around eighteen forty nine, thus the
Speaker 1: forty nine ers, a lot of people showed up in
Speaker 1: San Francisco and it went from not very many people
Speaker 1: to a lot more people, and it continued to have
Speaker 1: a red light district. It still does, but it's a
Speaker 1: different one now. And so when the gold Rush first hit,
Speaker 1: the main women working there were Mexican, Chilean and Panamanian.
Speaker 1: Soon after white women showed up for work. Also Chinese
Speaker 1: women who were mostly not free, and we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about that in a bit. Most of the Chinese
Speaker 1: women who worked in San Francisco for several decades were trafficked.
Speaker 1: To be honest, I wasn't sure if I was, Like,
Speaker 1: I was going to try and come up with a
Speaker 1: way to tell the script without having to talk about
Speaker 1: sex trafficking because most anti sex work campaign yeah, most
Speaker 1: anti sex work campaigners spread false information that implies the
Speaker 1: majority of sex workers in the United States are trafficked,
Speaker 1: we're working against their will. This is not the case,
Speaker 1: and anti sex trafficking laws are primarily used against women
Speaker 1: who are working. Consentially, to my understanding, most of the
Speaker 1: women of the time that we're talking about were if
Speaker 1: they were driven to prostitution, and some of them describe
Speaker 1: their work that way. It was because it was the
Speaker 1: only work available that paid women a living wage, And
Speaker 1: so many of them are very upfront that they're like, no,
Speaker 1: capitalism is why I do this job, right, and even
Speaker 1: would describe it that way, Like, in my mind, it's
Speaker 1: a very modern thing for Americans to actually have the
Speaker 1: courage to name capitalism as a economic system that is destructive.
Speaker 1: But people who aren't afraid to be publicly sex workers
Speaker 1: aren't afraid of a lot of things, so they're naming
Speaker 1: that from the beginning, this fear that of sex trafficking
Speaker 1: has been used to criminalize and mistreat sex workers since
Speaker 1: basically forever. And there's this whole white slavery panic in
Speaker 1: the early twentieth century that, alongside the international anarchist movement,
Speaker 1: led to the development of international policing between EUROPEID nations
Speaker 1: and the US. And shit, these were the things that
Speaker 1: international policing existed to stop, is white slavery. They didn't
Speaker 1: give a shit about all the fucking non white slaves.
Speaker 1: And then also like international political criminals, the anarchists, is.
Speaker 2: This where the Comstock law came into.
Speaker 1: No, that actually that predates that. We did an episode
Speaker 1: on that in early birth control pioneers. And Comstock was
Speaker 1: kind of in some ways, like the East Coast one
Speaker 1: of these folks in some ways. And he was a
Speaker 1: moral crusader who was like, I hate anything that might
Speaker 1: be sexy, so I'm going to stockpilot. I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: give me a jail. Yeah, and then I'm gonna fucking
Speaker 1: take photos and keep them in my archive of sexy things.
Speaker 1: He was a total fucking piece of shit. PERV Like,
Speaker 1: be a PERV, but don't be a good closet PERV.
Speaker 1: Just do it. It's fine depending on your thing. In
Speaker 1: nineteen ten, you get what's called the Man Act. We'll
Speaker 1: come back to the trafficking stuff later, but first we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about how it's been used, how anti trafficking
Speaker 1: laws are used to hurt people. In nineteen ten, you
Speaker 1: get what's called the Man Act, which makes it a
Speaker 1: felony to transport any woman or girl for the purpose
Speaker 1: of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.
Speaker 1: Gotta love a law that says it is illegal to
Speaker 1: do immoral This is the vegus law I've ever and
Speaker 1: the world is full of vague laws. It is mostly
Speaker 1: used at this point to criminalize interracial couples, especially black
Speaker 1: men who sleep with white women, like alumni of the
Speaker 1: pod Heavyweight Champion of the World, Jack Johnson at the
Speaker 1: first heavyweight boxer black heavyweight boxer of the world, and
Speaker 1: he was arrested under the Man Act for bringing his
Speaker 1: like I think wife to a different state. Oh, because
Speaker 1: it's immoral for a black man to sleep with a
Speaker 1: white woman at this time. Right. Occasionally women sometimes get
Speaker 1: arrested for like trafficking themselves. I tried to look this up,
Speaker 1: but it's a very hard and vague thing to google.
Speaker 1: This is something I hear from sex worker friends. But
Speaker 1: it it created this situation where I was like, women
Speaker 1: were like not allowed to leave the states they were
Speaker 1: in essentially because you were like crossing state lines. And
Speaker 1: if you're not like.
Speaker 2: Bringing my pussy with me, I guess yeah or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well if you leave it at home, it might
Speaker 1: be okay. But and so you with man Act, you
Speaker 1: start getting this conspiracy theory that there's this huge international
Speaker 1: movement of brown people who steal white women into sexual slavery.
Speaker 1: This is offensive on a million levels. One of those
Speaker 1: levels is that there was a real conspiracy, not a conspiracy,
Speaker 1: but there was a real criminal organization that was stealing
Speaker 1: of Chinese folks who are stealing other Chinese folks and
Speaker 1: transporting them into you know, it's like, but no one
Speaker 1: fucking gives a shit. I mean, some people give a
Speaker 1: shit about that, and we'll talk about it in a bit,
Speaker 1: But like I want to quote friend of the pod
Speaker 1: the Anarchists, feminist Emma Goldman, who's also in that Early
Speaker 1: Birth Control Pioneers episode. She probably did some sex work herself.
Speaker 1: Her sex work was have you ever heard of it?
Speaker 1: I have no idea how common the story is. She's
Speaker 1: an early feminist activist who's part of the labor movement
Speaker 1: as an anarchist, and at one point she probably does
Speaker 1: sex work and it's to raise money to buy her
Speaker 1: boyfriend a gun so that she can so you can
Speaker 1: shoot an industrialist who's like killing the striking workers.
Speaker 2: I had not heard that, but when you said friend
Speaker 2: of the pod, I was thinking, like, oh, you know,
Speaker 2: are contemporary not like this?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, No, no, no, no, just someone who's
Speaker 1: been on the podcast before. And she like shows up
Speaker 1: all kinds of places. Obviously, sometimes I go looking for
Speaker 1: it because I think she's cool. But I didn't go
Speaker 1: looking for her this time. It's just like she comes
Speaker 1: up more than once in this story because she's just
Speaker 1: part of this stuff. And so she has a quote
Speaker 1: about the Man Act. What is really the cause of
Speaker 1: the trade in women, not merely white women, but yellow
Speaker 1: and black women as well. Exploitation of course, the merciless
Speaker 1: moloch of capitalism that fattens on underpaid labor, thus driving
Speaker 1: thousands of women and girls into prostitution. And so again
Speaker 1: there's this exception to the no large organized groups stealing
Speaker 1: people into sexual slavery and that is the early Chinese
Speaker 1: American prostitution, which worked in the form of indenture that
Speaker 1: absolutely amounted to sex slavery. US law can be blamed
Speaker 1: for most of this. I think US law made the
Speaker 1: situation ripe for the ex sploitation of Chinese immigrant women
Speaker 1: because even before the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty
Speaker 1: two that explicitly banned Chinese men from bringing their wives
Speaker 1: to the States because the US wants Yeah, the the
Speaker 1: US is fucking evil. The US wants their labor right,
Speaker 1: they're building the railroads, doing all this shit, but they
Speaker 1: do not want their permanent residence right, So don't bring
Speaker 1: your family over. And the way that they would keep
Speaker 1: people from bringing family over before eventually just making it
Speaker 1: illegal for you to bring your family was by keeping
Speaker 1: wages low for Chinese workers so that they couldn't afford
Speaker 1: to bring their families. And that was a conscious thing
Speaker 1: that like bosses and shit were doing. Plus all of
Speaker 1: the anti Chinese violence that was happening those very common
Speaker 1: meant that people didn't want to bring their families over.
Speaker 1: They're like, I am going into this lawless, horrible, scary
Speaker 1: place called the United States of America to try and
Speaker 1: make some money digging gold. I will send it back
Speaker 1: to my family. You know, I'll be back when I can, right, So,
Speaker 1: the ratio of men to women in the Chinese immigrant
Speaker 1: community was very high. In eighteen fifty, there were four thousand,
Speaker 1: twenty five Chinese folks in San Francisco, seven of them
Speaker 1: were women. What yeah, And a lot of what you
Speaker 1: read about this whole thing blames it on like Chinese
Speaker 1: patriarchy or whatever, right, which is part of it. Patriarchy
Speaker 1: is part of it, and its specific Chinese characteristics, you know,
Speaker 1: cultural characteristics. But other sources make it clear those nativism
Speaker 1: and capitalism working together against Chinese immigrants that laid this
Speaker 1: groundwork for on free labor. So for Chinese women from
Speaker 1: around the countryside were kidnapped or lured or sold into indenture.
Speaker 1: Researcher Lucy chang Harata basically compares the American pre capitalist
Speaker 1: model of work with the Chinese semi feudal model. So
Speaker 1: instead of a business arrangement between adam and worker, it
Speaker 1: was fundamentally unfree. In the Western world, prostitutes were quote
Speaker 1: fallen women, whereas from the Chinese perspective, they were women
Speaker 1: obeying the orders of their family. But before anyone gets
Speaker 1: on too high of a horse about this, the West
Speaker 1: has a model for women who are forced to obey
Speaker 1: of their family too, the orders of their family, and
Speaker 1: that's called marriage. Things have changed culturally now, but it
Speaker 1: is not a free arrangement at this time right in
Speaker 1: the United States, to be a married woman. We've already
Speaker 1: talked about one woman who started doing sex work at
Speaker 1: her husband's assistance and for his profit, and I read
Speaker 1: a whole lot more about people doing that in this episode.
Speaker 1: This is not good. But what I'm trying to say
Speaker 1: is that because this thing that we're talking about leads
Speaker 1: to a lot of anti Chinese bigotry, you know, so
Speaker 1: I want to be like real clear.
Speaker 2: That what part of it? What do you mean, how
Speaker 2: did it lead to the bigotry?
Speaker 1: So a lot of anti Chinese bigotry at the time
Speaker 1: would focus on the fact that there was this sexual
Speaker 1: slavery happening to be like these people culturally bad, immoral? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like keep everyone out, continue the situation that actually makes
Speaker 1: this happen by criminalizing people like there was actually a
Speaker 1: couple of years from eighteen forty nine to eighteen fifty
Speaker 1: four where Chinese women worked freely in San Francisco, but
Speaker 1: by eighteen fifty four, Chinese secret society called Tongs, basically mafia's,
Speaker 1: managed to get a monopoly on the whole thing, and
Speaker 1: for seven decades, sexual slavery was big business in San Francisco.
Speaker 1: And this got all kinds of people rich, well, not
Speaker 1: all kinds, mostly men, although some women did run these
Speaker 1: things too.
Speaker 2: Did anybody get out of their indentured servitude? Like, did
Speaker 2: they get their freedom?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Okay, well, so it's funny. I read this whole
Speaker 1: thirty page academic paper about the specific conditions that they
Speaker 1: were dealing with, and it talked about how, on average
Speaker 1: the women ended up working for about four or five
Speaker 1: years on average for their indenture. A lot of them.
Speaker 1: That average is low because they died, right, A lot
Speaker 1: of women died as a result of this. There are
Speaker 1: stories that are potentially apocryphal about I'm trying to focus
Speaker 1: on the really horrible shit. A lot of them died,
Speaker 1: a lot of them were killed when they were no
Speaker 1: longer useful, and a lot of them died of all
Speaker 1: kinds of horrible bat shit. Yeah, but some of them
Speaker 1: did complete their indenture and go on. But more of them.
Speaker 1: I don't know more of them. A lot of them
Speaker 1: also got out by running away or being rescued, and
Speaker 1: we'll talk about some of those people in a little bit.
Speaker 1: This is the darkest part of the whole thing of
Speaker 1: this particular episode. So White landlords made a fucking ton
Speaker 1: of money off of this. They would charge Chinese like brothels,
Speaker 1: two to three times what they would charge anyone else,
Speaker 1: and they would and of course customs officials were being
Speaker 1: bribed constantly to get people into the country. And so
Speaker 1: the indenture is ostensibly I do this long enough and
Speaker 1: you'll be free. This is often a lie. The different
Speaker 1: there's like a couple there's like four or five contracts
Speaker 1: that have been found like specific language of this is
Speaker 1: what your contract is, and there's a lot of like
Speaker 1: conjecture and a lot of different ways that it worked
Speaker 1: in different situations. The women often became debt slaves, basically
Speaker 1: unable to pay for the fees incurred and smuggling them
Speaker 1: to the States. They even had to pay the wages
Speaker 1: of the kidnapper, and their contractors would say things like
Speaker 1: you have to work three hundred and twenty days of
Speaker 1: the year or your contract will extend automatically another year,
Speaker 1: but sick days don't count. Menstruating counts as a sick day.
Speaker 1: If you got pregnant, they would just like tack a
Speaker 1: year onto your fucking contract, and some ended up just
Speaker 1: trapped into perpetual labor their entire lives. So eventually the
Speaker 1: politicians slowly swung into action because they were racist the
Speaker 1: Chinese job the Chinese slaves were stealing jobs from white women.
Speaker 1: That was their fucking complaint.
Speaker 2: What.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because when there's no like like sleeping with people
Speaker 1: to be had, they would like do seamstress work and
Speaker 1: so like they're like stealing jobs because they're because they
Speaker 1: charged less, because they're.
Speaker 2: Anyway whatever to take less wages.
Speaker 1: Yeh, my god. Yeah, which is I mean that gets
Speaker 1: reflected to in the way that immigrant white labor was
Speaker 1: turned against newly freed black labor in the wake of
Speaker 1: the Civil War, where they were like these people worked
Speaker 1: for basically nothing because they had just recently worked for nothing.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: This was used as the main argument against Chinese immigrants
Speaker 1: in the US for a very long time, as if
Speaker 1: Chinese immigrants weren't the main people who suffered at then
Speaker 1: of these organized criminal syndicates racist laws. This is going
Speaker 1: to shock you. Didn't stop the problem. The Chinese Exclusion
Speaker 1: Act of I think eighteen eighty two forbade bringing women
Speaker 1: over like more explicitly, right, And this did slow down
Speaker 1: the importation of women, but it didn't stop it, and
Speaker 1: it made corrupt officials even more rich, and it led
Speaker 1: to Chinese Americans being trafficked as well. The earlier the
Speaker 1: first couple of generations are only taken from China, and
Speaker 1: now people are being captured in the United States as well.
Speaker 2: Why because it's illegal if you're already over here.
Speaker 1: So no, why they didn't from the beginning?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, why did that like encourage this trafficking of
Speaker 2: them later?
Speaker 1: I think overall, I think most of the women who
Speaker 1: were taken in China and girls who were taken in China,
Speaker 1: a lot of it was like arrangements with family. A
Speaker 1: lot of it was the family says, you are going
Speaker 1: to go do this, going to pay this indenture, or
Speaker 1: you are going to pay this indenture and send money
Speaker 1: back to us. Right, So people weren't there. There isn't
Speaker 1: a reason to do that with someone who is already
Speaker 1: in America, right because they're not necessarily part of that.
Speaker 1: I think this is like I read a little bit
Speaker 1: about this, so it's like half what I read and
Speaker 1: half me trying to put the pieces together. But basically,
Speaker 1: once it was no longer profitable or like possible to
Speaker 1: get the numbers of people you needed from China, well
Speaker 1: where are we going to get Chinese women? We're like, well,
Speaker 1: now there's Chinese women here too, because there's people who
Speaker 1: grew up here, right, Okay, So what was more effective
Speaker 1: than the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was explicitly a racist
Speaker 1: law at stopping this violence? Was also friend of the
Speaker 1: pod the concept of direct action, which is today's sponsor.
Speaker 1: If you have a problem, thank you, Thank you. If
Speaker 1: you have a problem, sometimes appealing to authorities and waiting
Speaker 1: for them to solve the problem is less effective than
Speaker 1: collectively with your friends and your community, looking into what
Speaker 1: those solutions are and doing it. Much like people drove
Speaker 1: the hounds out of San Francisco, you too can solve
Speaker 1: problems by the application of direct action, and then whatever
Speaker 1: other ads are just as good as direct action, just.
Speaker 2: As effective, just like capitalism is known for, yeah, go
Speaker 2: for it.
Speaker 1: Effective solutions to all of life life problems, assuming your
Speaker 1: problem is you don't have a new car. Here's ads
Speaker 1: and we're back. So some other folks worked way more
Speaker 1: directly to rescue these women, most notably the women themselves,
Speaker 1: who often escaped and they would get chased by tongue enforcers.
Speaker 1: Sometimes men would fall in love with them, and I
Speaker 1: guess it's like one of those things where, like, I mean,
Speaker 1: men falling in love with these often prove very bad,
Speaker 1: but sometimes it's actually very nice, right, They're actually very
Speaker 1: wonderful people, and so sometimes men would fall in love
Speaker 1: with them and then buy them their freedom. Right. Other
Speaker 1: women try to get in on the action too. Overall,
Speaker 1: the anti vice crusading hurt sex workers, and we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about that than the last
Speaker 1: chunk of what we're gonna talk about today. But sometimes
Speaker 1: it was justified and fucking cool, because it turns out
Speaker 1: it's not the selling of sex sex part that's bad.
Speaker 1: It's the fucking slavery part that's the bad part. Yeah,
Speaker 1: sometimes I'm like, I guess, so, like these seem really
Speaker 1: obvious to me, Like not all moral problems are obvious,
Speaker 1: but like this one seems obvious to me. I'm with you,
Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy five, five women opened the Presbyterian Women's
Speaker 1: Occidental Board of Foreign Missions, which is a long and
Speaker 1: fancy name for a safe house. They actually formed the
Speaker 1: organization two years earlier, but like the thing they did
Speaker 1: with it is in eighteen seventy five they opened this
Speaker 1: safe house or a rescue I believe they called it
Speaker 1: a rescue mission. A woman with a single best name
Speaker 1: in history, Margaret in this case, Margaret Colbertson, organized a
Speaker 1: home for escaping Chinese women. One of the most prominent
Speaker 1: organizers and rescuers at this place was a woman named
Speaker 1: tianfu Wu who had been born in China. She actually
Speaker 1: managed to get sold into servitude twice before she was
Speaker 1: an adult non sexual servitude. Oh, I know, it's like
Speaker 1: one of those like oh okay, and you're like wait,
Speaker 1: hold on, but it's like still like whatever. Anyway, she
Speaker 1: was sold into servitude as a child, and then she
Speaker 1: was like rescued by some lady. This part. I read
Speaker 1: a couple of articles about this person in a trunk
Speaker 1: of a book, but like didn't have enough detail. And
Speaker 1: then she like wound up working unfree as a domestic
Speaker 1: servant in a brothel in the San Francisco while still
Speaker 1: a child, and she was absolutely physically tormented and has
Speaker 1: scars and stuff about it. So she was rescued again,
Speaker 1: and this time she was rescued by the Presbyterians, who
Speaker 1: would just lead raids on mafia controlled spaces. Shout out
Speaker 1: to early feminists for being fucking brave, and so she
Speaker 1: grew up in the rescue alongside other rescued girls. They
Speaker 1: I think paid for her to go off to college,
Speaker 1: and then she came back and kept working at the
Speaker 1: rescue and she did two things a lot, and one
Speaker 1: of them is that she interpreted Cantonese for Chinese women
Speaker 1: who were in court. Because whenever, it's like whenever women
Speaker 1: would get rescued, the people who claim to own them
Speaker 1: would show up in court and be like, we want
Speaker 1: this woman back. But they would they couldn't be like,
Speaker 1: but we have this slavery thing going on. They had
Speaker 1: to instead be like.
Speaker 2: We own her, so can you just give her back?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so they had to be like, she stole
Speaker 1: close when she left or whatever, like you know, like
Speaker 1: the clothes or whatever the fuck. And so this is
Speaker 1: one of the this is some of the work that
Speaker 1: this woman did was to interpret and the other thing
Speaker 1: that she did was break into brothels and rescue people. Hey,
Speaker 1: thousands of girls and women were rescued by this organization.
Speaker 1: All kinds of different numbers are presented. It seems to
Speaker 1: be somewhere between two and six thousand were like personally
Speaker 1: rescued by like a small clique of women who did
Speaker 1: this work regularly over the course of decades, which is
Speaker 1: a not insubstantial part of like the total number of
Speaker 1: indentured women in San Francisco. Like it seems like a
Speaker 1: fucking I am making this number entirely up. Well, I've
Speaker 1: read some numbers and I'm making bad math out of it.
Speaker 1: It's like a twenty five percent chance that you're getting
Speaker 1: rescued by this organization. Oh, like they like were incredibly impactful.
Speaker 1: It gets blurry because no one's perfect in anyway. It
Speaker 1: get's annoying, But anyway, I'll talk about the moment. So
Speaker 1: she ends up working in this organization. She would also
Speaker 1: vet potential husbands for the girls to make sure they
Speaker 1: weren't like going to like kidnap them again or whatever,
Speaker 1: and also to make sure they were Christian. And her
Speaker 1: cool quote is people asked when she was going to
Speaker 1: get married, and she responded to say that men are
Speaker 1: only useful when it's time to move furniture.
Speaker 2: Good for her. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Another woman rescuing folks out of the mission was Donald
Speaker 1: Dina Cameron, a white woman born in New Zealand who
Speaker 1: earned the name the Angry Angel of Chinatown. So this
Speaker 1: rescue mission is cool as shit and overall like really
Speaker 1: fucking in the balance, right, but I hate that I
Speaker 1: have to do this in the balance thing. Rescue girls
Speaker 1: were forced to convert to Christianity and Christians and yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, like why can't people just be good for
Speaker 1: the sake of being good? Like yeah, looking, God forbid?
Speaker 1: And then some of them ended up contracted out as
Speaker 1: like fruit pickers in northern California by the Mish.
Speaker 2: My god, you guys.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And their argument was because they're Protestants, right, so
Speaker 1: idle hands do the devil's work, because they're trying to
Speaker 1: instill Protestant values, like a Protestant work ethic into these girls,
Speaker 1: as if these girls are lazy whatever. I'm so angry
Speaker 1: about this part. But it's like kind of another form
Speaker 1: of slavery, right it it is, but it's way the
Speaker 1: fuck more temporary. You're talking about like probably a couple months,
Speaker 1: and you're talking about like it it's do good, ORSM
Speaker 1: doing bad. But it's like as far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: and actually many women actually just escaped.
Speaker 4: Again.
Speaker 1: Many women were like cool, we're out of here, fuck
Speaker 1: this and took off right. But they yeah, they were
Speaker 1: like get taught to read and write, and they get
Speaker 1: converted and forced converted to Christianity, and they would often
Speaker 1: end up doing like four to eight weeks of work
Speaker 1: as contract workers to teach them the value of hard work,
Speaker 1: and then they'd be free and like and they seem
Speaker 1: to actually mean it, and then a lot of I
Speaker 1: believe I've only had the names of two Chinese workers
Speaker 1: at this place, but I ask only have the names
Speaker 1: of three white workers at this place. I don't know
Speaker 1: what the overall balance was, but a woman named Yamanda
Speaker 1: Waka ended upset, eventually left and set up a similar
Speaker 1: institution in Japan for other unfree sex workers.
Speaker 2: We'll take it, I guess, but yeah, yeah, try harder.
Speaker 1: And I don't like totally know, you know. I was like,
Speaker 1: like I read that that was the length of their
Speaker 1: contract as fruit pickers. I don't know how long. Like
Speaker 1: obviously some girls are like growing up there, right, I
Speaker 1: don't know if there until they turn eighteen. I don't
Speaker 1: know if they're there till they're married. That's my guess
Speaker 1: is it's like until one of the two happens. But
Speaker 1: I I'm not sure someone does know. There's entire books
Speaker 1: written about this, and I have one week to research
Speaker 1: and credit whatever anyway, preemptively being defensive for people who
Speaker 1: know more about these things. So the end of the
Speaker 1: red Light District. Usually don't read my little section heads,
Speaker 1: but I didn't have a good transition, so I'll just
Speaker 1: read that little section head in the script. People probably
Speaker 1: know that I read from a script and then I
Speaker 1: fall off script.
Speaker 3: Sorry, guys, be really fucking cool if you did not
Speaker 3: have a script though, that that brilliant.
Speaker 1: I feel bad for people who ask me the details
Speaker 1: about stuff like three weeks from now, because like, I'm like,
Speaker 1: it's gone three subjects later, you know, Yeah, I remember
Speaker 1: the broad strokes most of the time. Around the turn
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century, people were like, what if we
Speaker 1: got rid of the red Light District and then conflate
Speaker 1: everything that happens there from murder non consensual sex work
Speaker 1: to being the same as consensual sex work and consensual
Speaker 1: homosexuality and drug use and women having fun, and we'll
Speaker 1: call it all crime.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, it's not true.
Speaker 1: So that's what they did. San Francisco got its longest
Speaker 1: serving mayor in nineteen eleven, a boring guy named Sonny Jim, Yeah,
Speaker 1: who owned a shipping company and oversaw two different banks.
Speaker 1: Could you imagine the business card where you go into
Speaker 1: one of the two banks and they both have little
Speaker 1: business cards that are like sunny Jim, like like a audience
Speaker 1: can't see me smiling, But it's gross and scary. Is
Speaker 1: he a good guy or a bad guy? Just on
Speaker 1: the bad side? On the balance, not my favorite. He
Speaker 1: didn't like people having fun. He also didn't like women
Speaker 1: having basic fucking rights. Because all of the anti sex
Speaker 1: work claws that we're going to talk about, like the
Speaker 1: Man Act that prevents white women from sleeping with black men,
Speaker 1: all of the anti sex work while is that we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about just affect all women. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously they most directly affects sex workers. But I just
Speaker 1: it's like, how well in a way I put that
Speaker 1: later in the script, Okay. So, uh, it's so aggravating
Speaker 1: to me that a bunch of suffer jests and first wait,
Speaker 1: feminists were caught up in this anti vice shit because
Speaker 1: it's so transparent how it plays out is the destruction
Speaker 1: of women's lives and freedom. It's it's, ah, here's what
Speaker 1: I already. Yeah, I got right to the point I
Speaker 1: was going to make earlier. It's like, how you have
Speaker 1: all these supposed feminists now working alongside literal Nazis to
Speaker 1: drive trans women out of public life. Yeah. One common
Speaker 1: knock on effect of the current thing that's happening is
Speaker 1: that like butch CIS women, or tall SIS women or
Speaker 1: old CIS women, or just any woman who doesn't look
Speaker 1: properly SIS can get run out of bathrooms and changing
Speaker 1: rooms and shit. Yeah, and you've got people who want
Speaker 1: to inspect people's genitals all the time, including children hobby.
Speaker 1: I know, My god, I know. And this ties directly
Speaker 1: back in anti sex work stuff. The earliest sex work
Speaker 1: laws were involved a lot of genital inspection on a
Speaker 1: regular basis and bribery and shit. So in this campaign
Speaker 1: against vice, the city of San Francisco makes it illegal
Speaker 1: for women to go to or work at any bar
Speaker 1: in the Red Light district. Okay, yeah, so sorry, no
Speaker 1: drinking or dancing for you, because drinking at a bar
Speaker 1: is the same as doing sex work morally, which is
Speaker 1: the same as being forced into doing sex work morally.
Speaker 1: According to people.
Speaker 2: What are they going to do at the bar? It's
Speaker 2: like you're almost encouraging it, you know what I mean,
Speaker 2: You're like, no women can come here, except there will
Speaker 2: be the women that do. I don't know, it's yeah,
Speaker 2: this whole circular thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And like okay, well now I can't
Speaker 1: work as a waitress. Well what kind of work can
Speaker 1: I do? You know? In nineteen thirteen, So this past
Speaker 1: is nineteen thirteen one of the only good jobs in town,
Speaker 1: which doesn't even involve fucking anyone, like saloon dancing and shit,
Speaker 1: it's just suddenly gone. This doesn't even this law doesn't
Speaker 1: close the brothels, just the dance halls, and temperance is
Speaker 1: sweeping the nation, and soon enough, villains of the Pod
Speaker 1: the KKK would become the armed wing of the anti
Speaker 1: vice movement. This is something I didn't realize about the
Speaker 1: KKK until I did a series of episodes about them,
Speaker 1: is that the KKK were obviously their primary thing was
Speaker 1: the destruction of black freedom in the United States. But
Speaker 1: while they were at it, especially the second wave of
Speaker 1: the KKK, there's three waves or four depending on you,
Speaker 1: we'll look at it. The second wave that restarted nineteen
Speaker 1: fifteen was very waspy and very nativist, and so a
Speaker 1: lot of their enemies were actually immigrant Catholics as well
Speaker 1: as black people. And one of the things that they
Speaker 1: were is they were the armed enforcers for the Temperance Movement.
Speaker 1: You drink in your moonshining, the KKK is going to
Speaker 1: try and rough you up, which is so yeah.
Speaker 2: Sober Hell's Angels or something, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally yeah, like and so I just feel like
Speaker 1: that's like worth knowing who the bedfellows of the Temperance
Speaker 1: movement are, right, yeah, And this is coming all of
Speaker 1: my hatred of this Temperance movement comes from someone who
Speaker 1: I don't drink. I think drugs are overall really shitty
Speaker 1: and like most people should probably avoid them. I think
Speaker 1: gambling is one of the least entertaining ways to end
Speaker 1: up broke. Those are personal choices that adults make about
Speaker 1: their own lives. You know, the woman's Christian Temperance Movement
Speaker 1: are the main villains of this temperance movement from my
Speaker 1: point of view. They are of course opposed to all
Speaker 1: alcohol and drugs. They are also opposed to all sex work,
Speaker 1: and they forgot that it's actually very easy to be
Speaker 1: personally committed to a healthy lifestyle without wanting to put
Speaker 1: people into cages for having a different opinion than your own.
Speaker 1: Easiest thing in the world. It's harder to put people
Speaker 1: in cages than not. They managed to get sex work
Speaker 1: criminalized in most US states between nineteen ten and nineteen fifteen.
Speaker 1: And to be clear, while they're the Christian Women's Women's
Speaker 1: Christian Temperance Union, this is not all types of Christians.
Speaker 1: This is Evangelical Christians. And so sometimes i'm a little
Speaker 1: bit broad with the like Protestant complaint brush, but like,
Speaker 1: this is Evangelicals, not even all Protestants or whatever.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: They were tied into the suffrage movement. I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to say all suffragettes were into this, but it was
Speaker 1: a very big part of it. They were into voting
Speaker 1: rights for women, which helped the temperance movement dramatically. The
Speaker 1: fact that we get prohibition right when women get the
Speaker 1: right to vote is not a coincidence.
Speaker 2: Oh I didn't realize that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Interesting, Yeah, And like it comes from like a lot
Speaker 1: of it comes from this, like, well, men are shitty
Speaker 1: when they're drunk sometimes, right, you know, and so like
Speaker 1: it's a legitimate feminist thing to be like we want
Speaker 1: men to be drinking less, right.
Speaker 2: I don't want them to blow the whole paycheck or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but more of it was about a larger chunk
Speaker 1: of the evangelical like temperance movement was women. So when
Speaker 1: women get the right to vote, that dramatically impacts things
Speaker 1: in certain ways. And that is like someone's going to
Speaker 1: complain that I'm like saying that women should have the
Speaker 1: right to voteor whatever. Like it's just everything's fucking complicated.
Speaker 1: And also they're also into labor rights, the women's women's
Speaker 1: Christian temperance whatever.
Speaker 2: Full of contradictions.
Speaker 1: I know exactly in the eighteen seventies they've been around. God,
Speaker 1: they're still around.
Speaker 2: Actually.
Speaker 1: I think in the eighteen seventies they would go in
Speaker 1: like pray for and harass customers at saloons, kind of
Speaker 1: the way that like anti choice people do today. Outside
Speaker 1: of like clinics, right, they would just like hang out
Speaker 1: and yell at people for drinking.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: They worked really hard to Americanize immigrants from Germany and
Speaker 1: other like white countries to convince them how real Americans
Speaker 1: don't drink that like American this is that wasp culture
Speaker 1: that like is so mad at white immigrant culture. And
Speaker 1: this is like part of the hatred of Catholics is
Speaker 1: that they drink.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Also everyone has to learn English according to them. Also,
Speaker 1: they protested against Christians who drank wine like at church,
Speaker 1: like like literally the sacrament of drinking the blood of
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ. Yeah, so that you could have your eternal
Speaker 1: soul saved or whatever the fuck, because no way would
Speaker 1: Jesus's blood have alcohol in it because alcohol is a
Speaker 1: poison and Jesus is the savior. Okay, So, like they
Speaker 1: piss off all the I think Episcopals and Catholics. I
Speaker 1: can't remember who else besides Catholics is a into the
Speaker 1: blood drinking cult. Anyway they're interested in, they're not cool.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirteen, California past what's called the Red Light
Speaker 1: Abatement Acts, and these are modeled on anti liquor laws
Speaker 1: from the Midwest, and this act what it does is
Speaker 1: it holds property owners financially responsible for the nuisance of
Speaker 1: people performing like sexual labor for money, because at its core,
Speaker 1: sex work is performing labor for money. But it's a
Speaker 1: nuisance somehow. And Okay, there's a there's a meme that
Speaker 1: perfectly sums up how I think about sex work that
Speaker 1: a sex work a friend of mine sends me. And
Speaker 1: you know those like exploding head memes, was like the
Speaker 1: brain gets bigger and bigger, is the thoughts get bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger at the like the top, Like the lowest
Speaker 1: thought is sex work is sex and sex is bad,
Speaker 1: And then it goes up to sex work is sex
Speaker 1: and sex is good, and then it goes to sex
Speaker 1: work is work and work is good. And then you
Speaker 1: get the logical conclusion that I think any worthwhile analysis
Speaker 1: comes to, which is sex work is work and work
Speaker 1: is bad is bad. Yeah, And I don't know, it's
Speaker 1: shitty that people trade their bodies for money, You're right,
Speaker 1: temperance union. It's also shitty with coal mining. And it's
Speaker 1: shitty when it's sitting in a chair sixty hours a week,
Speaker 1: and it's shitty when it's fucking people. It work is shitty,
Speaker 1: But you know what isn't shitty is spending the money
Speaker 1: you make by selling your time spending it on stuff
Speaker 1: like why that stuff, this stuff, whatever it is, it'll
Speaker 1: make you happy. See it's so sexy. Whatever this is,
Speaker 1: it's just sexy as hell. Imagine No, I actually, I
Speaker 1: don't want anyone to imagine any of us with anything
Speaker 1: as relates to this. Imagine someone else with this stuff.
Speaker 3: Sex.
Speaker 1: God, damn it, here's master.
Speaker 2: You're gonna feel so sexy when you have this stuff.
Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you, And we're back so at the
Speaker 1: same time, in this temperance union and stuff is doing
Speaker 1: it's bad shit. A bunch of really cool shit starts
Speaker 1: happening about women talking about their experiences with work in
Speaker 1: a way that I don't think had been quite so
Speaker 1: publicly part of the American public conversation. In nineteen sex work, sorry,
Speaker 1: well as sex work as relates to wages for other work.
Speaker 1: But yeah. So in nineteen thirteen, there's this newspaper, the
Speaker 1: San Francisco Chronicle, and it started telling the sex workers
Speaker 1: side of the story. They were running memoir essays from
Speaker 1: a woman named Alice Smith, and to quote the San
Speaker 1: Francisco Gate from a modern article about this quote. She
Speaker 1: may have been a Midwestern farmer girl as she claimed
Speaker 1: lord to California by the siren song of opportunity. She
Speaker 1: may have been a few women whose collective stories were
Speaker 1: combined for a single narrative, or maybe she didn't exist
Speaker 1: at all. But in nineteen thirteen, there was no doubt
Speaker 1: about one thing. She was the most famous woman in
Speaker 1: San Francisco and the way her her stories were told.
Speaker 1: According to the San Francisco Chronicle, people, what happened is
Speaker 1: that this woman, the sex worker, would come in and dictate,
Speaker 1: or she would tell her story to a ghost writer
Speaker 1: on staff, who would then type it up and publish it.
Speaker 1: And this ran for i want to say, about two months.
Speaker 1: And this was like the biggest fucking press deal. And
Speaker 1: it's like and the paper's doing it a little bit
Speaker 1: because it's like, oh we care, and it's doing a
Speaker 1: lot of bit because like, oh, this sells some fucking papers. This, yeah,
Speaker 1: this sells fucking papers. People love sex work stories.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, who's the horn now, baby?
Speaker 1: So she wrote about how she became a sex worker.
Speaker 1: She wasn't kidnapped, and she was laid low by capitalism.
Speaker 1: She moved out to the Bay and she worked a
Speaker 1: series of shitty jobs, getting yelled at, getting called ungrateful
Speaker 1: for working. She worked like two months and earned three dollars,
Speaker 1: you know, And eventually she found her way to sex work.
Speaker 1: As she put it, quote, evidently, a prostitute is one
Speaker 1: who sold herself for money. Well, I wondered, was there
Speaker 1: anybody in the world, according to that, who didn't sell
Speaker 1: herself or himself for money? Yes, And her memoirs open
Speaker 1: up a floodgates and over four thousand letters get sent
Speaker 1: from sex workers to the San Francisco Chronicle, which published
Speaker 1: about three hundred of them. And the letters describe the
Speaker 1: author's own circumstances, how Christian families had left them on
Speaker 1: their street, whether like kicks them out of the house,
Speaker 1: whether for doing sex work or for simply for having
Speaker 1: sex before marriage. And there are so many good quotes
Speaker 1: in these letters.
Speaker 2: I want to read them all. Oh my god, this
Speaker 2: sounds fascinating. They're like, I'm sick of working at Walmart.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry. Yeah, like now I do sex work, Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: Like quote, why do you speak of us as belonging
Speaker 2: to the underworld? Who then constitutes the upper world? Is
Speaker 2: it the men who come to visit us? And why
Speaker 2: are they in any respect above us? Is the woman
Speaker 2: who marries for money or for social station any better
Speaker 2: than we are? Doesn't she not sell herself as well?
Speaker 1: Yeah? They just like people are dumb. They know what's
Speaker 1: happening to them, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And hero of the pod Emma Goldman, my personal friend,
Speaker 1: Emma Goldman, who I regularly communicate with.
Speaker 2: That's what I thought.
Speaker 1: The birth control activist. She shows up in nineteen thirteen
Speaker 1: and she's basically like, she gives a talk. She you know,
Speaker 1: she's an orator. She goes around and gives speeches about
Speaker 1: issues of the day and stuff. Because there's no podcast,
Speaker 1: so people had to go see people talk in person.
Speaker 1: And she was like, these letters fucking rule, and she
Speaker 1: talked about them a bunch at the talk. She was
Speaker 1: like this, this is this is good, this is great.
Speaker 1: And supposedly Alice, if she's a real person, she was
Speaker 1: in the audience and happy to hear her work recognized,
Speaker 1: and the next time she went in she was like, oh,
Speaker 1: when saw I'm a Goldman talk, this rules, you know.
Speaker 1: But not everyone was happy to support the sex workers
Speaker 1: with fifty three percent of the vote, the Red Light
Speaker 1: Abatement Act passed. I don't know if that's fifty three
Speaker 1: percent of like the state Congress, or if it was
Speaker 1: a ballot measure.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Initially is Christian temperance ladies that are yeah,
Speaker 2: well they can't vote yet. Actually, oh, this is nineteen thirteen.
Speaker 2: When did women get the right to vote? I want
Speaker 2: to say, nineteen eighteen. Oh God, I'm a history podcaster,
Speaker 2: Do do do do? When did women get the right
Speaker 2: to vote?
Speaker 1: Nineteen nineteen? Ratified in nineteen twenty. Yeah, so initially this
Speaker 1: law passes the nuisance law for you know, sex work
Speaker 1: or whatever, and it's not enforced. So some folks got
Speaker 1: really fussy about that. And by that I mean a
Speaker 1: bunch of right wing grifters did their grifty thing and
Speaker 1: got rich off of complaining at great length about sexy
Speaker 1: sexy win There is his asshole. His name is Reverend
Speaker 1: Paul Smith of Central Methodist Church. He was the kind
Speaker 1: of guy who stays up late at night, unable to
Speaker 1: rest because he's so bothered by the fact that women
Speaker 1: danced in public places, like literally as courts where he
Speaker 1: was like and they dance. Yeah. Yeah, he's so bothered.
Speaker 1: He's not just bothered by the strippers, Uh, he's bothered
Speaker 1: by women existing and dancing. He missed Jesus's lying about
Speaker 1: if thine eye offends the pluck it out and was like,
Speaker 1: if thine I offends the hurt women. And like the
Speaker 1: first couple accounts I read about this guy, it it
Speaker 1: talks about him as if he's just like going to
Speaker 1: his church and complaining right to his congregants, which is
Speaker 1: like shitty, but like whatever, on some level, I don't know. No,
Speaker 1: this guy is a lecturer and he is selling out
Speaker 1: halls like thousands of tickets at a time, again giving talks,
Speaker 1: good way to it whatever.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, it is a grift Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: And he's rallying against sex worker. He's rallying, railing against
Speaker 1: sex workers the whole time, and in these talks he
Speaker 1: gets kind of graphic. He goes on and on about
Speaker 1: how bad these loose women are, gets into some detail,
Speaker 1: so a lot of the audience would leave and go
Speaker 1: find sex workers.
Speaker 2: Tire, I love that he's doing like audio erotica.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so sex workers start hanging out nearby when
Speaker 1: he does talks because it's a good way to get
Speaker 1: work his bullshit fucking sermons. And he would go around
Speaker 1: and tour these various dance halls to uh see the
Speaker 1: proof of the corruption and sin, you know, like just
Speaker 1: fucking hire sex workers, bro, Like you clearly want to
Speaker 1: treat them, well, you don't deserve to.
Speaker 2: Dick, right. He's like, you know, one of those congressmen
Speaker 2: who's like getting blown in the bathroom and doing all
Speaker 2: the bills where he says it should be illegal.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, he's so fucking bad. And some of the
Speaker 1: things that he and his fellow temperance folks complained about
Speaker 1: included women drinking alcohol, liquors sold without meals, women dancing
Speaker 1: with strangers, and one angry headline was just women free
Speaker 1: with smiles.
Speaker 2: What a hater?
Speaker 4: I know, just funny because now we have this whole
Speaker 4: thing we were trying to not get told to smile, Like,
Speaker 4: now everyone wants us to smile, whicheverone controls us.
Speaker 1: That's what they want women to do.
Speaker 2: That's the thing. Women doing something I didn't give them
Speaker 2: permission to do. What the fuck?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So his campaigning and among others, but I think he
Speaker 1: was the most prominent was finally going to get the
Speaker 1: red light of Bateman Act and forced with the set
Speaker 1: date of Valentine's Day nineteen seventeen. Because nothing says love
Speaker 1: like evicting a ton of women from their homes at
Speaker 1: the same time as you take their jobs away. Most
Speaker 1: of them are single mothers, because women tended to live
Speaker 1: in the brothels, right, And so he called for a
Speaker 1: big meeting for everyone in his movement on January twenty fifth,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventeen, which is for an event he called a
Speaker 1: Purity Sunday, which I had to google and apparently is still.
Speaker 2: A thing, horribly named thing.
Speaker 1: Yes, and what he got instead on January twenty fifth,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventeen was the first known sex workers' rights protest
Speaker 1: in US history. Yeah, there's a madam named Reggie Gamble
Speaker 1: who called up and was like, look, let's talk. You
Speaker 1: say you want to help women, how about you hear
Speaker 1: from us. I'll come over and I'll tell you what
Speaker 1: our life is really like. And he said, yes, of
Speaker 1: course he did. He is fucking obsessed with sex workers.
Speaker 1: He also, on some level, I don't know, a lot
Speaker 1: of the articles try to like paint him as like
Speaker 1: actually caring. I'm not convinced. No, she doesn't show up alone.
Speaker 1: She shows up with three hundred other workers, white and black,
Speaker 1: working together. I wasn't able to figure out Reggie's race,
Speaker 1: though my impression was actually had a comadam who may
Speaker 1: or may not have been her lesbian partner.
Speaker 2: Oh but I'm.
Speaker 1: Getting into conjecture land. If Margaret says someone was a
Speaker 1: lesbian and I'm not providing the receipts, it's.
Speaker 2: Just pure fantasy.
Speaker 1: I think, slightly informed. You know, I spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time reading this shit, but yeah, totally so so.
Speaker 1: Reggie Gamble to get ready for this had been working
Speaker 1: alongside some women who worked for the San Francisco Bulletin Chronicle,
Speaker 1: which everyone was the one that did the thing. I
Speaker 1: think I wrote it wrong in my script here the
Speaker 1: paper those publishing sex were accounts. Two of the staff
Speaker 1: writers helped her write a speech right because she was,
Speaker 1: you know, very good at talking about things right, but
Speaker 1: not necessarily a writer. And one of the women who
Speaker 1: helped her write this this is the weirdest shout out
Speaker 1: I'm ever going to do on this show was a
Speaker 1: woman named Rose Wilder Lane, who went on to become
Speaker 1: an early American libertarian party activist and a committed anti
Speaker 1: racist activism anti racism activist. The rare libertarian win on
Speaker 1: this show, but credit where it's due. Libertarians have always
Speaker 1: been good about sex worker rights, not about labor rights
Speaker 1: more broadly anyway. Whatever, So Rose Wilder Lane helps her
Speaker 1: write write this speech. So they show up to the
Speaker 1: church and Reggie Gamble goes up to the pulpit and
Speaker 1: she gives a speech that was very explicit that this
Speaker 1: is a labor demonstration. They were very clear that they
Speaker 1: were fighting for their rights as labor activists. I want
Speaker 1: to quote the author Kim Kelly from her book Fight
Speaker 1: Like Hell, which if you like the show, you will
Speaker 1: like the book Fight Like Hell. It isn't entertaining.
Speaker 2: Kim Kelly, I know the fucking best.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the labor columnist for teen Vogue, Like, you can't
Speaker 1: go wrong with Kim Kelly.
Speaker 2: Kim's amazing, just amazing.
Speaker 1: Puts on a bunch of metal shows. It all ties
Speaker 1: back together. So this is a quote from her book
Speaker 1: Fight Like Hell. She swept past him and strode straight
Speaker 1: up to the pulpit, where her words made clear that
Speaker 1: this was a labor demonstration and that these workers had
Speaker 1: gathered to discuss wages in their own social and economic oppression.
Speaker 1: They were not there to convince hard hearted reformers the
Speaker 1: morality of their profession, but were instead there to castigate
Speaker 1: them for their own role in perpetuating the conditions that
Speaker 1: left sex workers poor and desperate. You want the city
Speaker 1: cleaned up around your church, but where do you want
Speaker 1: the women to go, she asked him. Men here in
Speaker 1: San Francisco say they want to eradicate vice. If they do,
Speaker 1: they better give up something of their dividends and pay
Speaker 1: the girl's wages that so they can live.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Basically they were like, look, if you want to
Speaker 1: eradicate sex worker, your sex work, you need to start
Speaker 1: by lobbying for higher wages and more educational higher wages
Speaker 1: for tru other forms of work, and better educational opportunities.
Speaker 2: And then they're like, wait a minute, just kidding, just
Speaker 2: do the sex work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. They're like, actually, we just have a punishment kink.
Speaker 1: We think that wages are too high for sex workers,
Speaker 1: and we figure if we criminalize it'll go anyway. No,
Speaker 1: that's even more cynical. Okay. Another quote is one of
Speaker 1: the girls told me that her brother a methodist minister
Speaker 1: when she applied for help to him only told her
Speaker 1: to trust in God. You can't trust in God when
Speaker 1: shoes are ten dollars a pair and wages are six
Speaker 1: dollars a week. And I just like fucking love that line.
Speaker 2: Amen.
Speaker 1: She also had fun pointing out how clearly he didn't
Speaker 1: give a shit about Jesus because Jesus was actually pretty
Speaker 1: good friends with sex workers, and that the protest wasn't successful.
Speaker 1: It's stopping the red light law. The red light law
Speaker 1: went through on February fourteenth, fourteen hundred women were thrown
Speaker 1: out of their homes and jobs. At the same time,
Speaker 1: three quarters of the sex workers were single mothers, so
Speaker 1: it's extra cool to evict them and take away their jobs.
Speaker 1: And the reverend guy the asshole, went on to say
Speaker 1: the day was the most dramatic incident of his life.
Speaker 1: He did start working towards minimum wage laws, but he
Speaker 1: never stopped his anti sex work zealotry. Meanwhile, once this
Speaker 1: law goes into place, brothel became basically defined as a
Speaker 1: woman rents this place without a man. So now women
Speaker 1: can't run anywhere to live by themselves. Thanks wrong, It's
Speaker 1: called the studio apartment buck an asshole. One hundred years later,
Speaker 1: on the anniversary, sex worker staged a protest on the
Speaker 1: steps of the same church with many of the same demands.
Speaker 1: But one thing that changed. We talked about this at
Speaker 1: the very top of all of it. One thing that
Speaker 1: changes sex workers are more organized now. The three groups
Speaker 1: that put together this particular protest was the Erotic Service
Speaker 1: Providers Union, the Sex Workers Outreach Project or SWAP, and
Speaker 1: the US Prostitutes Collective prose is all capitalized because you know,
Speaker 1: they call themselves pros And so these three groups organize
Speaker 1: this new protest. What's this era that we're oh, yeah, sorry,
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, one hundred years later on the centennial. Basically
Speaker 1: they recreated this protest, which is fucking cool. And this
Speaker 1: protest in nineteen seventeen was the first sex worker protest
Speaker 1: I'm aware of in the US, but as far from
Speaker 1: the last. I hope we'll cover more of the more
Speaker 1: recent organizing andcluding some of the stuff that you brought
Speaker 1: up at the top of the show, the strikes and
Speaker 1: the collectivization and all of that in the future. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's my sex work in the American West, and
Speaker 1: there's so much more. I feel like, honestly, there's there's
Speaker 1: just so so much more, and so people should take.
Speaker 2: A love that the successful unionization efforts have happened on
Speaker 2: the West coast. Yeah, the Lusty Lady in SF and
Speaker 2: then now the Stargarden Dancers in North Hollywood.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. And if folks are like curious, like what's
Speaker 1: going on and like all the stuff that like we're
Speaker 1: talking about about, like decriminalization and all that, like, well,
Speaker 1: what's the deal?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 1: I I but I'd heard all this stuff. I really
Speaker 1: recommend well reading and hearing from sex workers. I would
Speaker 1: recommend the SWAP the Sex Worker Outreach Project project as
Speaker 1: like one of the most well together, like public facing
Speaker 1: sources of information, because if you think you don't know
Speaker 1: any sex workers, it just means that you don't know
Speaker 1: anyone who's had who's told you out. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Strippers United is also an organization that's doing really good work.
Speaker 2: They have a fascinating Instagram and they have been a
Speaker 2: part of how the Stargarden Dancers were able to unionize
Speaker 2: and gave them a lot of information that helped support that.
Speaker 2: So they're a cool organization too.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, well that's what we got but what you
Speaker 1: might got is a thing where you tell people about yourself.
Speaker 1: Here at the end.
Speaker 2: End of the podcast, check out Private Parts Unknown. I
Speaker 2: also love to talk about sex work on that show.
Speaker 2: And I have another podcast called podcast Bestie about making podcasts,
Speaker 2: and a podcast called The Blea Readers about book writing
Speaker 2: and publishing. So check out my podcast obsession.
Speaker 1: These are many of my interests that you're listening. If
Speaker 1: you want to hear hear me right, it is not
Speaker 1: hearing you. Most of what you do is hearing. But
Speaker 1: the thing I'm about to say isn't I have a
Speaker 1: substack like every other podcaster that somehow also has a substack,
Speaker 1: But mine's better than anyone else's, with the exception of
Speaker 1: Roberts from cool Zone Media. And then once Jamie Loftus
Speaker 1: starts a substack, that one will also be good or
Speaker 1: better for sure. I heard Jamie mention that she might
Speaker 1: have to start a substack after complaining about substecks, So
Speaker 1: that's my challenge to her. I write every week about
Speaker 1: history and preparedness and a bunch of other topics, and
Speaker 1: then every other well half of them are free in
Speaker 1: public and the other half are more personal and are
Speaker 1: like memoir and journal and stuff like that, and those
Speaker 1: you have to pay me because if you want to
Speaker 1: see inside my head for the stuff that isn't what
Speaker 1: I'm trying to say to the world, then you can
Speaker 1: give me some money to do so, and then I
Speaker 1: can spend it on food that I feed my dog,
Speaker 1: who is a great dog, because I'm also a dog mom.
Speaker 2: Sophie, what's your substack called?
Speaker 1: Oh, it's technically the titles Birds before the Storm, but
Speaker 1: it's just Margaret Kildoy dot substock dot com.
Speaker 2: You gotta check it out.
Speaker 1: Hell, yeah, Sophe, what you got, soph You get a
Speaker 1: substack yet?
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 3: I wanna plug two episodes that PROP did on hood
Speaker 3: politics that are called y'alled outside my check or Marinate
Speaker 3: my Chicken, And it's just talking through some of some
Speaker 3: Supreme Court stuff that I think is really important.
Speaker 2: So you should definitely check those out.
Speaker 1: Buck Yeah, and we will see you next Monday with
Speaker 1: more Cool People Did Cool Stuff. Bye Bye.
Speaker 3: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 3: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 3: visit our website Coolzonmedia dot com or check us out
Speaker 3: on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts