Book description
A witty, wild-spirited, purely American autobiography by a prostitute-turned-madam who lived and operated at the turn of the twentieth century.
“Looking back on my life, and it’s the only way I can look at it now, nothing in it came out the way most people would want their life to…
Why read it?
1 author picked Nell Kimball as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Nell Kimball was the least educated of the prostitute authors I read but also the most colorful. And the only one who didn’t feel trapped in the profession. Like Josie Washburn, Nell couldn’t find a publisher for her memoir when she looked for one in 1932. She was 78 years old and reportedly in dire straits financially. Nell had started in the “trade” in St. Louis at the age of fifteen in 1867 and worked as a prostitute and then as a madam, lastly in New Orleans’s famed Storyville red-light district, until it was shut down in 1917. Nell died…
From Jody's list on 19th century prostitutes.
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