The letters of this 1910s ex-prostitute tell a story of urban life for women still relevant today
Published as ‘The Maimie Papers,’ they are a vivid artifact
“You see, when I write you, I write everything, and mostly the things that trouble me,” Maimie Pinzer told Fanny Quincy Howe in April of 1911. “That is because I love you,” she continued, “and don’t stop to think whether it would be better to write this or that, but just keep on writing what is on my mind — things that I have always had to keep to myself, for I never trusted any other woman.”
Maimie Pinzer was a Jewish ex-prostitute living in Philadelphia, and Fanny Howe was a Bostonian writer and philanthropist. The two were introduced by a social worker in 1910. They instantly took a liking to one another, and agreed to keep in touch. Over the course of the following decade, they remained in close contact, Maimie’s dispatches forming a vivid portrait of a poor young woman’s struggle to survive in the early 20th century American city — a struggle that in many ways remains the same today.
The letters were passed from Fanny Howe to her daughter Helen, and ended up in the collection of Radcliffe Library. Mamie’s half of the correspondence was published as The Mamie Papers in 1978. In a 1978 New York Times review of the collection, Louise Bernikow praised the book for elevating the voice of a poor woman, writing, “If the story of life ‘downstairs’ is penned ‘upstairs,’ what slant shows in the writing and what is left unobserved? How are we to know about those working women who lacked the luxury of a desk beside an organdy curtain and endless hours to write out their lives?”
Maimie Pinzer certainly didn’t have endless hours — she spent most of hers trying to find decent paying work — but she did write nearly compulsively. Some of the letters she penned to Fanny Howe ran 30 or 40 double-sided pages. She often wrote with a contagious ebullience, and sometimes, when feeling depressed, more contemplatively. According to scholar Ruth Rosen, who came across the letters while researching a dissertation on prostitution, and edited them for the book, “the handwriting changes with almost each letter…They were written late at night, and she was often deeply depressed. The handwriting mirrored her moods.”
From the act of writing itself, Maimie clearly derived real solace, and though only one side of the correspondence survives, it’s evident that in Howe she’d found a worthy confidante. Her notes began with lines like “I just came in and read your letter…I love you so much tonight. You make me feel so much at ease.”
Maimie also hadn’t really grown up “downstairs.” The Pinzers were an affluent Philadelphia family who ended up down on their luck after the murder of Maimie’s father. She suffered sexual abuse as a child. And though she wrote that it was a path she tried to resist, she was a prostitute by age 13. She’d been to jail and to a reform house. She’d also had syphilis, and had lost an eye to an infection of the socket. In the aftermath of that trauma, Maimie picked up morphine, and was soon addicted. Many accounts refer to her as “ravaged” by sundry physical ailments, surgeries, and a tenacious morphine habit.
Even when her tone is buoyant, Maimie’s letters betray a sense of the absurdity of the plight of the working woman. She is dogged by financial anxiety. In 1911, when the letters begin, Maimie is considering going back to prostitution, having “gone with men” in the past, but she’s living with her husband, a carpenter named Albert Jones, and trying to find work she can be proud of. She details various job offers — 75 cents per thousand envelopes addressed for an addressing company, $4.00 a week for helping around an office from 8:00am to 6:00pm every day — and calls them “ridiculous, but it seems as though I can’t get anything that pays better.” In one instance, her high hopes are dashed when she is denied for a job at a publishing company because she is married.
Given how hard she’d have to work just to scrape by, she writes, “I just cannot be moral enough to see where drudgery is better than a life of lazy vice.” And the life of “lazy vice” finds her anyway. At one point, while precariously employed, her boss demands sexual favors before he’ll hand over her pay.
When Howe sends Maimie some unsolicited financial help, she writes, “for almost a week, I kept the check uncashed in my purse; and you haven’t an idea what a help it was all week. It actually made a difference in my appearance. That sounds ridiculous, but it is so nevertheless.”
The letters chronicle all manner of mundane everyday details. Maimie and Albert move because their landlords are “Jewish of a very low order,” and the smells of their cooking — “garlic and onions and cabbage” — permeated the building. To Howe she writes, “While I have complained to you that I was miserably lonesome, still, I prefer to be entirely alone than to associate with plebian people.”
At one point, Fannie seems to have suggested Maimie try to publish her writing, to which the young woman responds, “I have thought much about what you suggested — that is, my trying to write something marketable — and I only wish that I could have the confidence in myself that you have in me.” Even so, the familiar struggle of the unpublished writer is in evidence throughout the correspondence. Maimie tells Fanny about every errand, every family encounter, job interview, person she meets, and book she reads.
Maimie never did become a published writer in her lifetime, but she did earn steady office work, and become a stenographer. She ultimately moved to Montreal in search of greater opportunity, and there became a self-fashioned social worker when she opened a halfway house for young prostitutes. As Bernikow wrote, she provided the girls “warmth and shelter of all sorts — magazines and books, medical attention, tea, communal meals, job skills, discipline, self-esteem, and care, care, and care.” Potential financial backers proposed to call the house the “Montreal Mission for Friendless Girls,” a label Maimie loathed, and that is how it came to be known. Still, the home was a highly unusual and welcome refuge for women. The establishment of the Mission is widely considered the first effort to organize sex workers in Montreal, possibly in all of Canada.
Though The Maimie Papers are not well known, they should be, perhaps particularly now, as she sounds so much like so many young women trying to find their footing in spite of the considerable challenges of their gender or class. As Bernikow wrote of Maimie in the New York Times, “She thought well and badly of herself, alternately and sometimes simultaneously. Some of her most moving letters are about depression, the despair of poverty, the ‘smallness of my life,’ and her yearning for something wider, cleaner, more full of sunlight and of love.”
The greater freedom she yearned for was hampered by her past, by poverty, and by femaleness. In one early letter, she writes, “I wish I was born a man, I know what I’d do this morning. I’d button up my coat and jump on the tail end of a train and steal a ride to wherever it was going and then when I’d get there, I’d stop to consider, ‘What’s next?’”
