Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor Highlight

Bessie Beatty and Rose Wilder Lane (daughter and collaborator to Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder and influential member of the early libertarian movement), helped Gamble write out a speech for the next day’s events—a final, high-stakes meeting with the Reverend Smith. Smith was aghast when Gamble arrived, accompanied by a crowd of three hundred other sex workers. She swept past him and strode straight up to the pulpit, where her words made clear that this was a labor demonstration, and that these workers had gathered to discuss wages and their own social and economic oppression. They were not there to convince hard-hearted reformers of the morality of their profession, but were instead there to castigate them for their own role in perpetuating the conditions that left sex workers poor and desperate. “You want the city cleaned up around your church—but where do you want the women to go?” she asked him. “Men here in San Francisco say they want to eradicate vice. If they do, they better give up something of their dividends and pay the girls’ wages so they can live.”