“Living like a Lady”: Maimie Jacobs’s Vernacular Charity in Montreal’s Red-Light District, 1914–1918

Abstract: Having previously sold sex herself before opening her “Montreal Mission for Friendless girls,” Maimie Jacobs (a.k.a. Pinzer) took an unusually sympathetic approach to providing healthcare, shelter, and employment opportunities to women working the city’s streets. This research draws two sets of letters Jacobs wrote to her benefactors: letters to Fanny Quincy Howe that were published as The Maimie Papers in 1977 under the pseudonym Maimie Pinzer, and previously unknown letters she wrote to George Herbert Welsh. The differences between these two sets of correspondence offer insight into Jacobs’s strategies for securing the funds required for her rescue work and further details about her life before and after the letters she wrote to Howe. I argue that Jacobs’s flexible, anti-institutional ethos of care was a vernacular form of charity, characterized by its legibility within the logics of the red-light district. Her approach reformulated established charitable practices and contemporary expectations around sexuality to offer young women a malleable respectability that took the form of a set of skills rather than expectations. Challenging the linear and vertical orientation of “progressive” era charity, Jacobs’s insight into the appeal of transactional sex, her spatial analysis of the red-light district, and her understanding of social morality and mobility reflected the worth and work of transactional sex in the early-twentieth century.