Through this mindfulness exercise, we will use repeating lines and simple shapes to help us focus and relax. Hello, Makers! My name is Courtney, and I am a studio guide from the Long Beach Public Library. Today, I will be leading you through a guided mindful drawing exercise inspired by meditative art practices. We will use the basic building blocks of drawing, line, and shape. A line is a point moving through space. It can be different sizes and length, and go in any direction. When combined with other lines, a shape is created. A shape can be geometric and precise, free-flowing and organic, or something in between. Working together, arranged, and repeated, beautiful patterns are formed in a drawing. When focused on a clear challenge, such as a drawing, our minds are able to reach flow, or focused mental state. When we slow down and openly accept the present moment, we practice mindfulness. It is my intention that through this practice, you are able to bring awareness to your body and mind as you create and feel the benefits of mindful drawing. Ready to get started? The materials you will need are a drawing surface. This can be any type of blank paper, watercolor paper, or even cardboard. You can cut or tear your paper down to a smaller size. You will also need a pencil. Any kind will do. In a dark pen or marker, something like a thin, sharpie, drawing pen, or ballpoint pen. Other optional supplies are something to blend with, like a q-tip or your finger, and any other drawing or coloring tools you have on hand, such as gel pens, markers, crayons, even try watercolor. I want to encourage you to start with an expression of gratitude. You are grateful to be using your favorite pen and sitting in your favorite chair. I am grateful to share with you today this secret that anyone can be an artist. Let's begin our drawings with pencil. Notice my pencil does not have an eraser. Sometimes we get caught up in erasing. I want to encourage you to not use your eraser and instead work slowly and with purpose to make each mark on your paper with acceptance and confidence. Lightly press your pencil to create a dot about a quarter inch from each corner of your drawing surface to create four corner dots. You can turn your paper to bring each corner to your pencil. Now connect each dot to create a frame. Again, you can rotate your paper to help pull these lines along your paper. These lines do not need to be perfectly straight. In fact, they can have a wave or a bend or even a loop.  Only your hand can create what you've made. We now have a frame or a border to hold our drawing. Continuing with our pencil, we will draw a line to break up our drawing space. This line can be any kind of line, straight, curve, loop, wavy, zigzag. The line can touch the frame and bounce back or bend in any direction. There can be one, two, or more lines. There are no real rules to follow, just do what feels right. These lines will create spaces within our frame to hold our drawing. Pick up your drawing. Turn it this way and that. Observe the shapes you have created in pencil. Choose a space to begin and grab your dark ink pen or marker. Begin with a single line or shape inside of that space. Trust yourself, there is no wrong answer. Repeat your line or shape or add other lines or other shapes in any way that you see fit. Maybe you drew a line so you draw more lines weaving under. Maybe you surround your shapes with more shapes that are growing or shrinking. There are no wrong ways to work. Just focus on each mark your pen makes as you move your arm one line at a time. Continue to breathe. Take a pause and observe your efforts by admiring and rotating your drawing. Lines and shapes together will form a pattern that will result in a drawing. When your first space is filled, move on to the next empty space and repeat this method. Take your time and pause the video if needed. Focus on one line, one shape at a time. Accepting your drawing as it forms. Slowly and deliberately add one line at a time. Really pay attention to how the pen feels as you pull it across your paper. We are not concerned with the end product. Just focusing on one shape, one line at a time. Remember to pause and observe your efforts. Admire what you've created so far. Turn your paper for inspiration and filling in the next space. Maybe try drawing a shape you've never drawn before. Take your time to fill the spaces as you wish, even pausing the video if you need. Once your drawing space is filled with lines and shapes to your liking, it's time to add some depth. Using a pencil, add some shading or darken areas. Help emphasize overlapping with shadows or darken the background or in between spaces. You can use a blending tool or your finger to create a smooth blend. Shading with tones of gray will give a sense of depth and realism to the drawing. It's interesting to see what a little gray line does underneath a shape. Suddenly it's floating above the paper. This step is optional, but I encourage you to try it. Take your time adding shading to your liking, even pausing the video if you need. When you feel you are done, admire what you've created. Give yourself a pat on the back, you've done something amazing. I encourage you to repeat this process or create your own mindfulness drawing practice at your own pace and utilize the benefits of mindfulness in your life. Try it as a part of your morning meditation with music or before working on a task as a way to settle your mind and find inspiration. Here are some mindful drawings from my friends at the library. Each one is different and unique just like the folks who made them. Thank you so much for joining me today and making time to watch Make Time. Look out for more videos and creative projects you can make from home. Now it's your turn to create. Until next time!


the whistler and the whistler and i know many things for i walk by night i know many strange tales hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows yes i know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak and now the whistler's strange story enough rope it came to martin ford's as a terrible shock during the year since the death of his wife margaret he had buried himself in his painting managing somehow to drive the horror of it all out of his mind but now it was back again back in the person of a police lieutenant who had called without warning and quietly dropped his bombshell and so mr form's we thought you'd want to know the man who killed your wife was arrested late this afternoon the men i i can understand what such a shock to you but you see the investigation has never stopped when a man has killed six people the police department doesn't give up easily the man confessed well no the arresting officers had to use their guns he's in the prison ward at the hospital naturally we hope you'll come around long enough for questioning but you're you're certain he's the strangler there's no doubt about it yes it's my duty to inform the relatives of the victims i'm only sorry it couldn't have been sooner well i'm sure you people have done everything possible it must have been very difficult yes it has been well we really hope we have something in the case of of your wife it's being a little different from the rest different the weapon i mean in all the other cases it appeared the strangler used a silk scarf but with your wife yes they told me a length of rope was clothesline judging from the market too bad he didn't leave it around oh would it have made any difference oh yes even a scrap might have prevented his next murder our analysts could have placed it down and with luck we'd have had a description of the man who bought it well the fact that you've captured him now yeah yeah we'll find out the whole story now well mr. Forbes they should be getting back i suppose if you learn anything further we'll pass it along of course there's a chance he may not pull through but well we want to be as thorough as he was not leave any loose ends around and he looks like oh yes of course well i'll see you to the door oh no no don't bother hey good night mr. Forbes we'll keep in touch good night lieutenant good night loose end even a scrappy scent can't leave a scrap yes it came as a terrible shock didn't it mark but not for the reason the lieutenant suspected no it's something more impelling than grief that sends you upstairs to your attic studio just a scrap of rope the lieutenant said just a tiny scrap would be enough to tie up the case to reveal that artist martin Forbes had used a series of local strangling to cover up the murder of his own wife naturally the actual length of rope you use was destroyed immediately afterwards wasn't it martin but the piece that came from the odd length used to tie up an old trunk to hang in your studio and on the attic wall you know now that every piece must be found and burned at once on the way out to the incinerator you realize that the front doorbell is ringing hastily you stuff the rope under a chair cushion and hurry to answer i guess well you are home almost gave up i've been standing here ringing but i was busy upstairs i have you are mr. Forbes at martin for that's right i'm harvey brand of claire brand husband claire brand well i'm sorry mr brand but i can't ever recall meeting your wife oh you never did claire was uh well she was one of the strangling victims too just like your life mr. Forbes oh mind if i step in a minute oh no no please do just wanted to talk to somebody you know i mean after that detector fella came by with the news said he was coming here next oh yes yes he left uh it's short time awful shock having it all brought up again isn't it uh i don't sit there uh this other chair it's more comfortable don't worry about me there's your phone anyway oh yes well excuse me hello oh darling Adele five volt dr. few are i guess what i am rather busy at the moment well we'll call you a little later huh fine fine i'll come back later then goodbye you tremble as you hang up the phone don't you mark because the sound of her voice brings it all back to you and with a stranger sitting here in your living room you can't even afford to think about it you killed your white Margaret because of Adele didn't you you wanted to be free to paint to be with her it was the poetry of those two things that resulted in your murder plan and Adele the way in europe had no idea what you meant when you told her the night she sailed that things might be different after her two years study in europe the sound of harvey brance voice cuts into your thoughts bad news mr. Forbes oh no no no it's nothing are you were saying mr. van make it harvey yeah you see to get to the point i thought it was time you and i ought to get together we'll get together sure talk things over since claire passed on well how do you do it do what keep busy keep your mind occupied oh well i have my work you see i've done endless painting oh sure it was a man the time he wants oh i you're lucky having it work out that way i just have the memories some of them not too good the flour and i didn't get along very well oh my fault of course i suppose you and your wife were very happy together very i guess the ladies any of them would be attracted to you then i guess i was too demanding of claire you know didn't give her enough rope yes another could i get your glass of wine or something mr. van the harvey i haven't been very hospitable oh it's all right you had your friend there to think about oh that was nothing i still i might slip over to this other chair well let's say it's under the cushion i'll take that speaking of rope mr war yes but the housekeeper must have left it there she's often very careless i i wonder if you'd mind you caught me as a rather busy time sure sure you've got to get back to your painting huh sorry i didn't mean to stay anyhow i would like to talk to you again sometime or any time mr brand the rope oh yeah someone's walked out with it in my hand here you are the old saying i'd give a man enough rope and um well tonight mr forbes martin by the way i've often thought it odd about your wife the way she was killed what do you mean well it was different from the others i mean he used a rope yes he did didn't well uh good night mr brand good night martin i look forward to seeing you again soon there it is martin after a year without interruption or threats a year to paint in the dream of a lovely dark eyed girl who would someday come sailing back from europe to find you a free man it isn't that simple at the moment is it not with the killer you blame lying unconscious in the hospital the police lieutenant who looked at you with quiet gray eyes and harvey brand who somehow seemed to have more on his mind than grief harvey worries you and so does the rope the rope that can hang you if you don't watch out after harvey leaves you waste no time in getting the rope outside to the incinerator you watch the smoldering flame and then with a line of poetry running through your mind you start down the narrow path to the place where your wife's body was discovered more than a year ago to reach the goal off afar to pause and catch a falling star quite a jack the man who wrote those lines free thinker ain't not restrained by laws you're not either are you mr ford's well i i don't know what you mean lieutenant i uh i noticed you were burning something in your incinerator oh well it's only bad very bad you're only supposed to do that between six and ten in the morning huh oh hey did that what brought you back here lieutenant oh no i had a little trouble with my car back here in the street behind you so i cut across the back lot i thought perhaps i could use your phone oh certainly i'll show you where it is all right good mr brad was here right up to a moment ago all right i thought he was coming over you know we worry about him and we're afraid he might do something foolish suicide i don't know but uh mr ford's if he ever does get acting particularly uh would you tip us off might save something from happening oh i'll be glad to cooperate you know you'd be doing us a favor to sort of uh well take him under your wing you've managed to adjust yourself so much better yes i've tried to busy myself in my work are the phones in this way oh having company uh no no i'm not expecting you oh the phone's right on there lieutenant just help yourself all right thank you at the island darling you sounded so strange on the phone no no no don't don't get out but no i don't know darling darling i can't see you now it's just one of those things it's nothing too important and i don't understand there's a little cocktail bar down the street a few blocks the blue lamp i'll meet you there in an hour or so how's that well all right darling i'll you're waiting to martin ford's is a brief account of my two years in euro i had an awfully hard time keeping my promise not to ride while i was away even though you didn't like me i missed you so much darling as much as i have missed you oh much more you probably forgot all about me the moment i stepped on the boat oh no i could never forget you were there you were never out of my mind not once well i must say you're welcome home was rather strange martin goodness the way you were shooting me away from your house a little while ago well you probably had some gorgeous redhead modeling for you and you didn't want me to see it oh i know we're just the same after we're married i'm going to insist you paint nothing but grapes apples elderly ladies and vans everything you said martin yes it has upset you hasn't it what i mean about the man the police caught oh how about you poor darling having to go through all this again the papers are making a holiday of it i know i'm sorry i had to find out this way i suppose i should have written to you about it but i couldn't bring myself around i understand naturally i tended to tell you when you came home well it's all over now martin the best thing to do is to forget it completely that's right we'll just forget it another martini i think not darling oh darling you're so jumpy it's only the pinball machine over there man must hit the jackpot or something your turn glance toward the end of the bar the man standing at the pinball machine is harvey brant he nods in your direction and a thin smile crosses his lips as he turns to speak to the bartender you slip off the bar stool start for the door with a dell at your elbow before you're halfway across the room harvey calls to you harvey partner now what oh oh hello well how are you my boy i'm fine harvey just fine leaving so soon are you yes we were going out to dinner i just stopped him for oh i was hoping i could buy a drink martin and uh the young lady of course so to celebrate my good fortune i just hit the jackpot oh well thank you very much but do we have surely you won't turn old harvey down near sir woodling uh adel uh this is harvey brant now do you do woodling you're not for me are you by any chance no dexas texas well what do you know adel i think we better oh now martin my boy you can't rush off like this drag this charm a little lady away before we had a chance to do some texas talk no how about a drink now we should be getting along really darling i don't mind it's still early that's the ticket come along folks there's an empty table over here oh waiter you're trapped aren't you martin and you sit there for the next half hour listening to harvey brant passing himself off as a lifelong friend finally you managed to fake an important phone call when you return to the table you use it as an excuse to break away then you take a dell to dinner and you can see she's been impressed by the good-humored friendly mr brant after dinner you drop a dell off at her hotel then drive home and as you start up the front steps a familiar sound reaches you the slow rhythmical creaking of the port swing oh harley your uh little lady friend left a cigarette lighter in the lounge oh oh thank you i'll give it to charming young woman very charming intelligent too like intelligent women here no no longer not very well i was under the impression you'd met quite some time before your wife died i met her only recently she's interested in in art yes just while you were making that phone call she mentioned that she'd been studying in europe the past two years seems she also said something about knowing you before she went abroad if i'm not mistaken well it's all rather convenient the way things have turned out isn't it singy martin uh no thank you no well i think i'll turn in now if you don't mind i have a busy day tomorrow that's the trouble with you martin you work too hard don't relax enough you ought to have a hobby i have in fact i have several hobbies well that's fine harvey but tell me martin uh are you interested in guns yes i have a wonderful collection just what you'd need to give you a nice start frankly it takes up a little too much of my time but with all the other hobbies i have been thinking of giving it up the gun collection i mean oh i see it's worth quite a bit of money well naturally i wouldn't expect you to pay it all off at one time i could let you have a couple pieces now and then sort of higher than the installment class well i don't know if i could afford it harvey oh i'd make a fair price on the collection i'm sure you wouldn't have any trouble at all meeting the payments well well i don't know harvey perhaps uh harvey is what i need i'm sure it is martin pick it over anyway there's no hurry all right i'll i'll think it over good night oh lieutenant morning mr forb's i hope i didn't disturb oh of course i want you to me oh no no no thanks hey i just happened to be passing by i thought i'd see how you were getting along uh-huh the um killer any new development still lingering oh he hasn't regained consciousness no no not exactly he muttered something last night something about not killing them all not killing them what do you suppose that means oh we don't attach much importance to it the man's in the coma they often say odd things but tell me mr forb's about harvey brand is he feeling any better well yes yes i think so um there is one question i'd like to ask you lieutenant all right what's that mr brandt uh is he well all income i mean why do you ask that well i was just curious he doesn't seem to have a profession you know i've i've wondered about that myself the man doesn't seem to have a dime sometimes i don't know how he gets along at all oh i see oh that answer your question mr forb yes that answers my question that's right martin the question is answered now isn't it explains harvey's suggestion that you buy his gun collection somehow he's learned the truth about your wife's death guess that the reason for it was a dell and you're going to have to pay for his silence still you're not quite certain that harvey intends to blackmail that is until that evening when you're out driving with the dell martin i'm a business day friend of yours friend well that night mr brandt brandt yes he happened to be in the neighborhood and what do you want oh just drop by to say hello and chat a little what about he's terribly interested in you darling as a matter of fact he's quite interested in both of us oh what did you know all about me how we met and where he was full of questions my goodness is he usually that inquisitive no no not usually he also mentioned that you were thinking of buying his gun collection oh yeah i didn't know you were interested in guns martin well when i wasn't really in a short time ago well it's always nice to have a hobby but isn't this one have to be a bit expensive yes i'm afraid so are they all afraid it's going to be very expensive i'll know how expensive tonight i'm going to see harley well martin come in come in sorry to make it so late oh it's quite all right quite all right now make yourself comfortable so you decided to take that gun collection off my hands huh i knew you didn't doubt it for a minute the uh the price harvey we haven't discussed that yet ten thousand dollars will take care of everything ten thousand cheap martin considering everything i know about guns yeah i'll show you some of the pieces let's finish cleaning them before you arrive there's one martin finest old pistol i ever saw isn't it a beauty yeah that's a fine gun is it loading sure is take it easy now yes sir you're gonna get a lot of pleasure out of this collection my boy am i harvey ten thousand dollars for collection of crummy guns the whole lot's not worth more than a hundred dollars i don't understand what i'm not buying harvey now just you thought you could believe me for ever said i had didn't you you should have known harvey if i murdered my wife i wouldn't hesitate to murder again wait a minute martin it's not too late to talk things it is too late harvey it's too late for anything of this oh i wasn't sure before now that you'd killed your wife martin but now i know oh you didn't think i'd be silly enough to have you a loaded gun did you and you didn't think i'd be silly enough to come here without a gun of my own did you harvey it's almost over now isn't it martin the anxiety the suspicion the sheer terror of it all the killer dying in the hospital will never talk again you're sure of that and harvey brant the only other person in the world who knows you murdered your wife is gone now dead at your feet you wipe the fingerprints from the gun press it into harvey's hand confident it will appeal as a simple case of suicide and you're not worried the gun will be traced to you no you took care of that little matter over a year ago when you first planned to kill your wife but the opportunity never presented itself then the strangler came along and he provided you with a perfect plan less than 15 minutes later you're slipping into your house quietly through the study door and then suddenly you stop there's someone in the next room you can hear his voice slowly you open the door yeah yeah that's right no no he hasn't come in yet all right yeah i'll be here there you are hello mr forms oh lieutenant side door was open i thought you'd be around yes i was out for but the fresh air that's so he didn't go over to brance by any chance oh no no what makes you i i think you ought to know mr forms we've been watching harvey brant for a long time had his phone tapped for weeks checking everyone who went in and out of his house we don't overlook any bets at all when we're watching a guy like brant nobody's been in and out of that house that we haven't seen you mean yes i mean you were seen coming out of brance place the man you heard me talking to in the phone was the man watching brance house but then you yes we know exactly what happened when you were there you know mr forms we've been certain right from the start that harvey brant killed his wife but what i don't get is why you killed harvey brant the whisperer


Thank you We just really want to extend our gratitude first and foremost to the San Francisco Public Library And to all the archivists here who we worked with as well This is actually where our story begins interestingly enough and We're gonna we're gonna take you over the next hour essentially through the narrative of how we discovered this document the many sort of research Roads that this project took us down over the course of discovering Alice Smith's memoir and And hopefully you get a pretty well-rounded picture of sort of the history of this story And we definitely welcome questions afterwards But yeah, as I mentioned it was it was a little over four years ago that Devon and I were Hulled up here behind a microfilm reader at the San Francisco main library on the fifth floor and We discovered the memoir of Alice Smith published in 1913 by a newspaper called the San Francisco bulletin and Her story was titled a voice from the underworld so you can see the opening installment here on the screen At the time we knew very little about this piece What we did know is that it was one of the first serialized memoirs published by Fremont older Who is the fascinating editor of the bulletin who began his career as a vitriolic crusader? But later became an emphatic advocate for social justice. We knew that older himself And later biographers connected his publication of a voice from the underworld to a later protest Which was organized by a group of prostitutes in 1917 and we knew that this was likely the first sex workers rights protest in modern US history But what we did not know when we discovered this document and what we could not easily find was anything about who this Alice Smith was Well, who was this woman? Why was she writing her story? And for that matter why did the bulletin publish her memoir was her story meant to inspire fear titillation pity perhaps or maybe compassion and Did Alice Smith even exist or was this just some political maneuver orchestrated by the paper to boost sales? And engage in the white slavery debate that had taken the nation's media by storm and that will get into a little bit later on in this presentation What motivated the bulletin a leading newspaper in an ever-growing metropolis to publish near this memoir? First of all, but also nearly 300 letters written by other sex workers and working-class women telling their own wide-ranging stories Over the course of our research We paid attention to today's newspapers and to the changing face of San Francisco amidst the second coming of the tech industry We witnessed the shuttering and attempted cleanup of many of the city's centers of vice You may know the tenderloin is now being rebranded as Union Square West Obviously the nude men in the Castro have to cover their bits with decency sheaths and The pot smoking runaways on Hates Street are being arrested for sitting on the sidewalks We watched many of our working-class friends get pushed out of the city over the course of working on this project and faced our own eviction Troubles and as San Francisco changed before our eyes We cannot help but recall our research and notice similarities to 1913 when Alice Smith's memoir was published The post-earthquake booster ism of real estate after the 1906 earthquake the cleanup efforts before the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition The eventual closure of the dance halls brothels and gambling dens of the Barbary Coast in 1917 all sounded strikingly familiar We also noticed a burgeoning discussion about feminism sex work and sex workers rights happening on a global scale today in 2015 Amnesty International Adopted a controversial policy goal of decriminalizing consensual sex work worldwide This policy spurred a media blitz and suddenly op-eds written by current and former sex workers were appearing in major papers Like the New York Times the Washington Post and Guardian UK We could not help but notice a number of striking similarities to a voice from the underworld in 1913 and today politicians religious groups anti-trafficking activists Celebrities and feminists all have had an enormous hand in shaping the way we think about sex work But how many of us have actually heard from sex workers themselves? Both in the bulletin in 1913 and today sex workers are demanding to be heard and to be taken seriously and to be given agency Over their own lives, and that's really the key of this whole work It seems that in 1913 Fremont older the editor of the bulletin genuinely Attempted to help the situation by opening the pages of his daily paper as a public forum for equitable debate And for once the opinions of prostitutes were published alongside those of prominent politicians and clergymen What that story we're gonna tell you today is sort of about how this story came to be and what Alice's memoir meant for San Francisco, which at the time was really a city in flux and We hope that each of you are able to quiet your own preconceived notions about sex work for the next hour and perhaps Our grand hope is that this presentation will give you some food for thought sort of about the greater spirit of San Francisco What the sort of cultural soul of this place is Whether San Francisco is a sanctuary for social leniency and social justice Or if it's an imperial center of global wealth and power and how these two different Conceptions of San Francisco have swung back and forth over time and what that actually means for the residents of this city So we're gonna Start off the the story of the publication of Alice Smith's memoirs really begins during the gold rush As so much does with the history of San Francisco And it really begins with two different newspaper editors So a lot of our story is told through the newspapers and through San Francisco is fascinating and Very dramatic history of the newspapers The first editor James King of William He was a vigilante newspaper man who hoped to clean up the shanty town metropolis of San Francisco during the tumultuous 1850s his paper the San Francisco evening bulletin Was his platform where according to one historian he flayed the politicians the prostitutes the gamblers the toughs the police And just about everything in sight while championing the home the church the school and reform The gold rush San Francisco due to its geographic isolation held in its infancy a very relaxed sense of morals to say the least Gambling and prostitution were widespread and accepted in a city where men outnumbered women 50 to 1 with this gender imbalance in 1849 prostitutes ended up serving an Interesting and important social function within this male-dominated world Now throughout during this time there's something that in academia call Jacksonian gender roles, but really what this is is From about the 1830s on There's a real clear delineation between the roles of the genders women and men sit were considered to be biologically different Psychologically different Men were supposed to function in the public sphere and them in the public sphere They they controlled the world of economics politics, but they are also passionate and sexual to a fault and they needed to be curved and controlled by women and these would be so-called proper women this would be women who were asexual by nature they Controlled the domestic sphere the sphere of morality religion the home now these women didn't come out to early San Francisco in the beginning the women that did come out were for the most part prostitutes and The social codes dictated that men in a public in the public sphere as Controllers on the public stage for San Francisco has always been a very public city They needed women to to to fulfill this this this this role and for a time prostitutes and madams were accepted in society because there wasn't an alternative and and they Could acquire a considerable amount of social status and certainly money They also broke a lot of rules in a way because they were acting in the economic in the economic sphere Which is the sphere of men? And they also were not championing the home. So when so-called proper women Started to come out in in in the early 1850s more and more this imbalance was restored and prostitutes were relegated into vice districts most notably the Barbary Coast which was got its name in the 1860s from infamous North African coastline known for for its piracy James King of William the crusading editor who sought to clean up the city was gunned down in 1856 His death helped spark the infamous vigilance committee of 1856 Which resulted in public lynchings and open insurrection in the name of law and order Vice and civic corruption would go hand-in-glove in the minds of future reformers and vigilantes including Fremont older who took over the reins of the bulletin in 1895 he started out as a Vigilante and a real law-and-order newspaper man Though he would in time become one of one of the great fighters for the those without a voice He became quite radical as we'll see But he originally wanted to use the Bolton as a tool of vigilantism He wanted to follow what James King of William was doing. He wanted to go after corruption Corruption and vice as he believed went hand-in-glove and you had to clean up vice in the city if you wanted to clean up civic corruption He attacked this with a certain religious fervor and the person who he really went after is a man by the name of Abraham Roof This is a famous the graph trials of the first decade of the of the 20th century The publication of Alice Smith's memoirs actually really goes right back to Abraham Roof We can't go too much into this whole story, which is a fascinating one, but The corrupt political boss in the overzealous editor clashed throughout this decade and Fremont older very much wanted to put Abraham Roof in prison. He was a political boss. He pulled the strings of the mayor at the time Mayor Schmitz But the editor by 1910 started to have serious doubts about this crusade trying to go after a roof and he felt that if he say cut the head off of this of That the body would wither that this man was responsible for the corruption And he didn't realize or he started to realize that there was a lot of corruption a lot of corruption in a lot of places Getting rid of this one guy wasn't gonna do it So he started going after other people Including some of the business elite in the city and this would didn't go over very well with with the business elite in the end Abraham Roof was sent to San Quentin and Fremont older started really being disturbed by this crusade of his so he Went over across the bay to San Quentin and was shocked by the inhumane conditions He was truly truly shocked The next day he's on the paper. He says mercy for Abraham Roof He wants roof out of prison who he just spent nine years putting in prison People thought he was insane a lot of people really thought he was insane Teddy Roosevelt Yeah, Teddy Roosevelt was a big player in this and and a friend in ways or They knew each other at least a free mon olders Teddy Roosevelt wasn't happy with this at all Fremont older new people were confused And so he wanted to get his point out and I want to read you just a little bit of a speech that he gave explaining why and this this really comes all the way back to why he published this memoir of Alice Smith I Have asked for mercy for roof because I felt that I ball above all others had done most to bring about his downfall At last after eight years of a manhunting and man-hating debauch Roof crossed over and became what I wanted him to be a convict stripped of his citizenship Stripped of everything society values except the remnant of an ill-gotten fortune It is then I said to myself. I have got him. He is in stripes He's in a cell his head is shaved. He is in tears He is helpless beaten chained killed as far as his old life is concerned. You have won How do you like your victory? My soul revolted. I Saw myself also stripped that is stripped of all pretense sham self-righteousness holding the key to another man's cell I dropped the key. I never want to hold it again Let it be taken up and held by those who feel they're justified in holding it. I want no more jail keys and This really began a part an episode It was a profound shift in Fremont Older's life where he decided instead of becoming a Vigilante newspaper man that was trying to destroy Corruption instead it's like a prosecutor if you can think about it like something like a prosecutor to becoming something of a public defender and He decided to give a voice and to try to protect people that that didn't have a voice in society And this was a huge shift that same year While he was visiting Roof in prison He met a man named Donald Lowry now Fremont Older gave Abraham Roof a platform and asked him Would you write your memoirs to be serialized in the bulletin to explain your position? This is the best way that I can defend you is to let your words get out and he did It was called the road I traveled It was Pretty successful though people were still pretty weirded out by by older defending this man that he Essentially, you know was one of the people that put him in prison But he had a considerable more success with this next memoir serialized memoir that he decided to publish which was a memoir by a man named Donald Lowry Donald Lowry was a prisoner who Was trying to smuggle out his memoir of life in San Quentin including Hort the tortures that were that were being perpetrated at the prison He would face a huge huge He probably wouldn't have ever gotten out of prison had those memoirs been smuggled out, but caught it had even caught So he was very scared about this because he was gonna get out in a few years Fremont Older Was fascinated by him Fremont Older still had quite a lot of political power and he actually had him He had him paroled under his wing gave him a job on the newspaper and asked if he could publish those memoirs in his paper My life in prison became an important book and it did that book the publication of it ended torture in both Sing Sing in New York and San Quentin and Folsom prison in California and Prison historians of prison and prison reform have pointed to Donald Lowry's book as one of the foundational works of The prison reform movement Fremont Older was part of this. He also was wanted to continue this this project and When The red light abatement law, which we're gonna talk about in a moment came up the idea of publishing The memoir of a prostitute became very important and Alice Smith and Fremont Older met Yeah, so By the time Fremont Older prepared to publish Alice Smith's story women had entered a new era of political Engagement in San Francisco and nationwide really in 1911 California voters approved a suffrage bill Which is nine years before the 19th amendment made it legal for women to vote nationwide and The enfranchisement of women indicates obviously a major shift in how gender roles were defined as we mentioned You know for many decades there had been these sort of solidified ideals of women as the defenders of the home these sort of asexual moral rulers of the private sphere men as being naturally the violent and sexual and Social and therefore prepared to engage in the sort of muddied world of politics and finance Which were considered far too sordid for Gentle feminine sensibilities as they were seen at the time But the second you have suffrage pass and women engaging in the public sphere politically these notions sort of start to crumble of course Now it's not a coincidence that these suffrage movements coincided with these sort of These these national scandals of civic corruption like these graph trials with a brief that Devin was talking about But also corruption scandals at in Tammany Hall in New York City The these scandals really connected in the minds of Americans concepts of political deviancy being connected to vice crime and criminality and there was a strong desire to sort of clean up Politics nationwide and there was a sense that women who now were politically enfranchised and who were was still considered to be by nature moral Had the natural capacity to reform the the sordid world of American politics And rather than outright rejecting these gendered notions that had forced them to remain within the private sphere of the home for so long Many women argued that yes, they could bring morality and righteousness to this depraved world of politics And and so while implicitly agreeing with gendered notions that were still rooted in misogyny Suffragettes were able to win the vote and thus enter the public sphere in a legitimized way And immediately upon enfranchisement California's largest women's clubs began campaigning to pass a number of statewide reforms The California Federation of Women's Clubs, which was the largest largest group of organized women quickly agreed upon a legislative Platform that included new testing standards for dairy products the creation of maternity homes joint guardianship over children But the main law that really galvanized this new women's movement was called the red light abatement and An injunction act and the goal of the red light abatement act was to close the state's brothels By attacking those that profited off prostitution namely the property owners of houses of ill-fame or brothels And though prostitution was already technically illegal in most places across the state through various, you know City or countywide laws that had been passed it still existed often in these sort of you know Segregated districts that police and politicians would turn a blind eye to These segregated districts were sort of considered a necessary evil a forced society a place where Men's lusts could be siphoned into and away from so-called decent women and And actually there's an interesting There's an interesting anecdote analysis story where she she arrives in a new small mining town here in California and Wants to find the red light district and asks a local police officer who doesn't hesitate to point her in the right direction So club women were horrified by this civic corruption that they believed allowed prostitution to flourish and the red light Abatement Act was designed to circumvent this corrupt police power by empowering Citizens to directly file public nuisance complaints against suspected houses of prostitution And it's true that these club women were not entirely incorrect It had been recently exposed that San Francisco's Union Labor Party mayor Eugene Schmitz and Abraham Roof the political boss of Fremont Older's ire had been bank-rolling half of the profits from a notorious Barbary Coast brothel on Jackson near Kearney Street, which was then popularly nicknamed the municipal brothel But did that necessarily mean that these women could destroy the institution of prostitution by closing the brothels down and What would become of the state's prostitutes and dance hall workers? Many of the state's legislators argued that this law would simply scatter prostitution throughout the state and out of the confines of these segregated districts The women's clubs responded by beginning a fund to create settlement homes for these newly unemployed and evicted sex workers But as the women of the San Francisco Center of the California Civic League, which is the earliest iteration of the League of Women Voters soon discovered few if any of these sex workers actually agreed to move into these homes and you can see if you go to the Well, the California Historical Society has a box of the League of Women Voters papers that we've been looking through where they have these meeting minutes and they interviewed Hundreds of these Barbary Coast women and asked them would you move into our settlement homes? You know would you reform if we closed down the brothels and the dance halls and really the resounding answer is no the vast vast majority Many of these club women based their assumptions about prostitution on these white slavery narratives that had for the previous decades Taken the nation's media by storm these narratives distilled racism and national anxiety around modernization and immigration and portrayed sex workers as victims enslaved by depraved pimps and Intrapped and assorted an inescapable underworld that was often run by people of color and While many of these stories which were published in Nearly all of the nation's newspapers There were a ton of plays even Eugene O'Neill wrote one of these white slavery narratives as one of his first sort of big off-Broadway productions They were passed out in pamphlets often by suffragettes in in coalition with their their vote get get out the vote paperwork and Many of these stories were claimed to be penned by real sex workers But the vast majority have been debunked as just entirely propagandized See but it was these stories that really inspired the California club women to see themselves as the saviors of these victims who were in their minds really in need of saving And due to concerted pressure placed on the slate legislate state legislatures by the women's clubs The red light abatement act was signed and passed into law in 1913 It was quickly contested and sort of went back and forth. There was a long referendum battle, but that's the real sort of world into which Alice Smith emerges and and one of the main reasons why Fremont older felt it was important to put these women's stories at the forefront of a discussion that Would obviously greatly impact their lives, but from which they had been almost entirely ignored So I'll Smith story it follows her from her humble midwestern Upringing to the shores of the Pacific where she works at different times before she turns to prostitution As a telephone operator a domestic servant a laundry worker and then itinerant farm worker Before turning to freelance prostitution, which eventually leads her to work at various brothels and then as a short stint as a madam Alice's story deals with many controversial topics such as abortion police corruption and the sphere of female interdependence within the brothel system a voice from the underground ran six days a week over the summer of 1913 causing an Unprecedented response from the bulletins readers according to the bulletin nearly 4,000 letters flooded into the offices and nearly 300 were published alongside Alice's story 114 of these letters were penned by other self-proclaimed sex workers and many by single working-class women making the bulletin the primary mouthpiece for sex workers and One could argue perhaps for working-class single women as well during the red light abatement controversy in San Francisco The bulletin unlike rivals such as the pro red light abatement act examiner. That's one of you know Hearst's papers, of course the examiner Refused to fixate upon this so-called white slavery frenzy by early 1913 the paper had announced the upcoming memoir And this is what the paper had to say the bulletin Alice Smith's story and the remarkable letters from women of the underworld which have been printed with it will accomplish several things One end has been attained already no open-minded reader of the story and the letters will ever look upon prostitutes as he Or she once did as much victims of our social system as the children who work in southern cotton mills or the Exploited who give up their lives in the bowels of a skyscraper's foundations In a separate editorial the paper directly criticized the methodology behind a top-down Cural legislation that really failed to adequately address the core issues at hand as it read as the bulletin wrote in this other editorial Our legislators did not consult the women of the underworld the women themselves must speak They must tell their side freely and fully and their words must be weighed and studied Otherwise our best efforts are but experiments the state legislator had struck at one form of vice Holy ignorant as to whether the alternative is a worse form of vice It would build a refuge for women This is one of these settlement homes this idea of Building homes for for for women's you know as I've he said As shelters without knowing in the least whether women will flee to that refuge The legislature is in the position of a doctor who gives his patient a pill without asking a question of the sufferer The pill might do nothing or it might cure or it might kill or it might stop one sickness and start another The sensible doctor would first learn the patient's symptoms first at first hand In keeping with what would become a tradition at the bulletin of memoirs being ghosts written from interviews by newspaper staff We uncovered evidence that Donald Lowry who wrote my life in prison and as I was just talking about Was one of these people who interviewed Alice Alice did not write her own words. It was ghosts written by a senior reporter named Ernest Hopkins We discovered that Donald Lowry that we hadn't find any evidence of Donald Lowry actually having any part in this but we really thought he Did And he was one of the people that interviewed Alice now we had a lot of concerns and there was a lot of questions this era of yellow journalism sensationalist papers the Bolton's competing with the Great yellow the the er yellow journal the San Francisco examiner under Hearst And there's a lot of reasons to suggest that perhaps the Bolton made this all up Perhaps it was purely ghosts written that they wanted to sell papers. They wanted to get in on this We weren't sure we really felt that by by looking at it not as a traditional white slavery narrative of which it wasn't but For the most part you can't find actual memoirs During this period that are remotely trustworthy and many academics had pointed that out to us. So people were a little skeptical In our introduction we tried to address this but remarkably two days after the book came out We actually discovered Alice Smith's real name and she was a person I'll tell you very quickly about what happened Ernest Hopkins. He was the ghostwriter in 1930 had turned to writing pulp novels or pulp fiction for a pulp paper and was struggling to make enough money to support his family and this is the first year of The Depression and he said hey remember he wrote to Fremont Older and said remember that that story A voice from the underworld remember that we always wanted to make it into a book but we felt like it would be politically maybe dangerous to actually publish at the time and He said I think now we could do it 1930 and really he was basically saying I think we could make some money off of this But one of the issues was he you know now keep in mind He's the sole writer of this piece. He was the only ghostwriter He wrote it but he's having to ask Fremont Older for permission to publish it because he said remember We must contact Mabel because it is Mabel's story and we need to It was so important to you that any money that we made off of the publication of voice from the underworld that a significant Percentage of those funds had to go towards Mabel and he asked you know where Mabel is. We actually know her last name. We're deciding not because we're The question of anonymity is so important the Bolton kept tridenty Protected for so long and we only stumbled across it in the archives at Cal Berkeley that We are figuring out what we're gonna do with it But we want to keep the spirit of that and not mention her last name until we publish further up on it and So just that and that and that's really if you read the introduction to our book so much of what it deals with is this question of who is she did she really exist and You know if this story is a composite of many different women's stories or if it's totally fabricated Is it still relevant and and we really argue and and make what I hope is a strong case that it's still relevant as far as just revealing different attitudes about sex work and feminism and working-class women and marriage etc at that time But it really you know and one of the main core things that we deal with in our introduction is this question of anonymity and how critical it is Within sex workers narratives even today often are written anonymously And and it's because there there is such an intensive stigma here in our society that pseudonyms are used Not only by sex workers as sort of a performative choice, but as a way of protecting their identities for very valid and critical reasons and so We really felt that You know by by calling her Alice Smith and by apparently taking all these pains to protect who she was Which made it challenging as researchers because we couldn't just say oh, yes We know exactly who this woman is we can trace who she is when she was born when she died etc We instead had to deal with her as sort of a mystery And and invest a lot of faith in the San Francisco bulletin, which which we did not take lightly in any way But that anonymity really is the the sort of critical linchpin of it And that's why like we said we're we're still continuing to Maintain privacy around her name, which you can find if you want to go to the Berkeley-Baincroft Yes, we're not hiding it if you would like to go to that archives It's easy enough to actually find if you know where to look if they're in the Fremont older papers with his correspondence with Ernest Hopkins in 1930 two quick points about that and then we actually have to wrap this up pretty soon Two quick points is that Incredible thing that Ernest Hopkins asked is he said you know what when we publish this we can return the original ending He says that remember we had to change the ending about how she got out of prostitution Remember for political reasons we couldn't tell the real story. Well if we republish this In a book form we can actually tell the actual story Unfortunately, they never did well, I guess fortunately for us they never did because we got to publish it Unfortunately, we don't know what that story is so But that also I Suggest to us that her memoir must have been really quite Pretty accurately to portrayed if they're just talking about the need to change the ending because the ending was something that was maybe politically a bit of a hot potato The other thing which was interesting is Fremont older wrote back to him and said I Saw Mabel within the last year, which means that as of 1930 Mabel still lived in San Francisco And it was no longer a prostitute or that's at least what it would seem Sure, do you want to read let's read a couple let's read a couple excerpts if you want to read We'll just read a couple excerpts both from Alice's story and from some of these letters So you can get a taste of sort of the diversity of these narratives But that was really the thing that clued us into the fact that this was a really important document when we discovered it not only was Alice's story gripping but as we mentioned at least 300 other letters were written into the paper and published alongside specifically by other self-proclaimed sex workers and working-class women And and then of course, you know dozens of other letters written by the mayor of Berkeley wrote in and weighed in on his opinions many club women wrote in and gave their opinions on all sorts of topics from marriage to abortion to Capitalism etc. The list goes on and on and the voices are so wide-ranging in their opinions and their political backgrounds And they're sort of class backgrounds, and that's really what was the most fascinating aspect of this document to us Yeah, we'll read one one excerpt from Alice's memoir one of the main points that comes up over and over Throughout the literature throughout reading primary sources from the time the newspapers But it was that the typical wage for a working-class woman was six dollars a week, which was Historians have claimed to be literally starvation wages And that would the the expectation is that women who are single there's something wrong with them You're supposed to get married, you know And so if you're a single working-class woman, it's like, you know, yeah, okay You have your six dollars a week But you're gonna have to supplement that with a man in some way whether it's a family or whether it's a husband This is what Alice does when she starts Working out before she becomes a prostitute how she's gonna live on six dollars a week. I Went back to my new two dollar room turned on the light sat down on the hard bed and figured things out I had a sort of feeling as if I was hanging by a thin rope over a volcano Six dollars a week take out two for room rent that left for a week for eating clothes Carfare washing and a good time Cut out car fare cut out clothes for the present my old shoes would have to do cut out washing I do it myself in my room cut out. Yes cut out the good times I'd need that four dollars just for eating divide it by seven that meant six sixty cents a day Ten cents for breakfast twenty for lunch thirty for supper that would make twenty four That'd make four twenty a week. I'd be twenty cents short Well, maybe Sundays I'd go without eating only twenty cents worth And those questions about class really are the sort of defining I Think that's the real linchpin of Alice linchpin of Alice Smith's story And and many of these sex workers who wrote into the paper were really complaining about this disc Disconnect excuse me between reformers who tended to come from upper-class educated white Christian families and and and they they felt they were being Pigeon-hulled as victims when in reality they were coming from an incredibly diverse background you know many of these sex workers obviously weren't white and Many were facing extreme poverty, but some were not as well and and just to give you sort of a taste of some of these voices and How sort of controversial and and contemporary they seem nowadays Alma Green who She wrote a series of like seven or eight letters into the newspaper that were really eloquent and lengthy She was a 21 year old sex worker raising two kids in one of the kind of high-class Sprothels here in San Francisco, and we've included one of her letters here in this volume She admitted that she preferred the self-made life of an escort to that of a society woman's charity case And and Georgia G another sex worker wrote as for building a home for us They will never fill it because there is not a woman among us that will accept it unless we are forced to We feel that if we do so there will always be somebody to point the finger of scorn at us no matter how good we tried to be and one of these women Cecil Linden talks about how You know she she was actually a dance hall girl. She wasn't a prostitute She was a dancer and one of these dance clubs on the Barbary Coast and these reform women were essentially Treating her the same way that they would a prostitute and we're trying to create laws Simultaneously as they were closing down the brothels that would also Prevent women from working in establishments that served liquor for instance Which meant that any girl who was a waitress or a Bartender or anything like that would be out of a job obviously or a dancer in one of these clubs And Cecil Linden says when I was 15 years old I was thrown out on the world to make my own way Raised of a good and loving mother and not knowing the ways of the world I entered the nightlife and now I myself would work as a In a proper job and be glad to get it But I can't get work to do and she shows up at one of these sort of reform houses and Asked the associated charities to get her job and they asked her for references And so she she expresses a lot of anger and frustration around that so I was gonna so what if any of you are interested in purchasing the book just We have a 70 page quite a long Introduction where we go into considerably more depth than we have tonight about Questions we have Alice's memoir and then we also have 12 different letters by sex workers Interspersed throughout it to give a little bit of a sense of what it was like to maybe read read it as a date as a serial in the paper We've also been working to publish a number of the letters that we weren't able to include because there are so many and this book Obviously would have been enormous if we included all of them that we loved on our website And so we can give you a card for our website Which has a blog that we've been pretty regularly updating with some of the unpublished letters as well And then we also have an email list of we'll be doing Several event a bunch of events next year Including anyway You can you can have a look at the the final thing that we'll tell you before opening it up for questions I just want to mention the sex workers March really quickly So after the publication of Alice Smith's story the red lighted a man act it passed its final hurdles statewide It took a number of years But by 1917 the city's police force was finally directed to shut down the Barbary Coast and to evict all the brothel workers Which it was 14 hundred women who were all kicked out onto the streets on Valentine's Day 1917 which happy Valentine's Day But before that they they were given a warning by the police department that they would be evicted and So a number of these women decided that they were going to organize a protest which if you read Current histories of sex worker rights organizing The real beginning tends to go back to like say the 1960s 1970s here in San Francisco and this March in 1917 is really a forgotten piece of history and the reason why it's connected to Alice's story is because these Madame's who decided to organize the March needed to get the word out quickly and they approached their friend Fremont older the editor of the San Francisco bulletin who had developed such intimate connections with a number of women of the underworld that they Knew that if he sent out a messenger He could get the word out throughout the Barbary Coast within a night And so these two Madame's Reggie Gamble and Maud Spencer went to the bulletin offices They worked with Fremont older to write a speech to send out letters to all these women and the next morning At least 300 of them showed up on the steps of this church where the Reverend had been one of the primary campaigners For the closure closure of the Barbary Coast essentially and they showed up on his doors they they showed up on the doorstep they flooded the church pews and Reggie Gamble marched up to the pulpit and Gave a whole speech about you know, you want us gone, but where do you want us to go? Are you going to offer us work? You know living wages that we can live off of if we're not prostitutes And we don't mean this six dollars a week that you that you guys keep offering that they're paying us we mean an actual living wage and The Reverend Paul Smith kind of balked and had nothing to say back to them.  It didn't mean that a month later. They weren't all evicted but it connects this greater history of of Sex workers rights organizing and social justice organizing here in San Francisco That we believe began or that most people historians believe began in the 70s and the 60s all the way back here to 2017 and Our our next scheduled event actually is with the Tenderloin Museum on January 25th, which is the hundred-year anniversary of this protest We're gonna be working with some contemporary sex worker rights activists to stage another march to the site of the of the classic church So if you're interested in that event Do sign up on our email list and we'll keep you in the know Is there any yeah, I turn over to questions