Maimie Pinzer

Early Life in the United States

Maimie Pinzer was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Philadelphia, United States. (See also Jewish Canadians.) Her parents, Julia and Morris, were immigrants of Russian-Polish descent. (See also: Russian Canadians; Polish Canadians.) The couple had three sons and two daughters, including Maimie. In 1898, her father’s murder led to a decline in the family's income and lifestyle. At the time, wealthy women like Pinzer's mother, did not work. Now struggling financially, her mother dismissed the two domestic workers and took young Pinzer from school to help with the housework. Thus, Pinzer‘s schooling was cut short when she was 13, even though she loved to learn.

Pinzer was also a victim of family sexual abuse. Her uncle sexually abused her at a very young age.

To rebel and gain some financial independence, she took a job at a department store as a teenager. It was there that she began to meet men with whom she could have sex in exchange for money. (See also Sex Work in Canada.)

Her mother was furious when she found out that Pinzer was spending several nights at one of the men’s home. She reported her daughter to the police. As a result, Pinzer was incarcerated at the Philadelphia City Hall police station at the age of 13. She offered sexual favours to a police officer to let her out of her cell.

At the behest of her mother and uncle, who describe her as an incorrigible child, a judge placed Pinzer in the Moyamensing prison located in Philadelphia. She was then institutionalized for a year at the Madeleine Convent, a religious institution intended to reform rebellious girls.

After spending a year at the reform school, 14-year-old Pinzer was left to fend for herself. She was then subjected to the social realities of the time. Uneducated working-class women, like her, depended on marriage, factory work, domestic work, or sex work to survive.

Over the course of her life, Pinzer often had to rely on sex work to support herself. She did not solicit on the streets or in brothels. To maintain a good reputation as a high-class sex worker, she met rich men in fine restaurants and lavish hotels.

Between 1904 and 1905, Pinzer was hospitalized several times to treat sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections. In particular, she suffered from syphilis, possibly contracted through sex work. She underwent 31 surgeries that led to the removal of her left eye, leading her to wear an eye patch for the rest of her life.

During the same period, possibly due to pain and repeated medical interventions, she developed an addiction to morphine.

In 1906, she married Albert Jones, a carpenter who was also missing an eye. However, his modest income was not enough for the couple. Pinzer made ends meet with sex work. She left her husband in 1911 and ended up divorcing him.

In December 1911, hoping for a stable career, the young woman in her mid-twenties began training in stenography.

Did you know?
Maimie Pinzer was multilingual. During her life, she learned to speak German, English, French, Russian and Yiddish.

Pinzer then went to live with her childhood boyfriend, Ira Benjamin. In 1917, he became her second and last husband.

In the early 1910s, she moved in with one of her brothers in Philadelphia. In 1911, after 11 years of poor family relations, Pinzer spoke to her mother again. Gradually, she reconnected with other members of her family.

Life in Montreal

In 1912, Maimie Pinzer moved to New York to work as a stenographer in a firm. In 1913, she moved to Montreal, Quebec, where she worked in the Montreal branch of the same firm. A year later, she was promoted to interim manager.

After experiencing sexual harassment, she quit her job. In 1914, she founded the Business Aid Bureau with Jean Holland, an Irish immigrant who, unlike her, had a university degree. But, after a few months, the company had to close its doors due to the First World War that shook the business world.

The Montreal Mission for Friendless Girls

Maimie Pinzer had several precarious jobs with meagre incomes. Because of her missing eye, many employers refused to hire her for positions that involved direct interaction with the public.

Unable to find work, Pinzer decided to help sex workers, as she herself would have liked to have been supported ten years earlier. At the time, Montreal was the epicenter of nightlife in North America. However, sex workers in the Red Light district (now in the area around Place des Arts) posed a threat to the Catholic Church‘s moral order, making them the target of police crackdowns.

Pinzer contributed in her own way to the emergence of social movements that denounced the precariousness of the working conditions of the working class. In 1915, she opened a home to help sex workers: The Montreal Mission for Friendless Girls.

Did you know?
Maimie Pinzer hated the condescending connotation of the shelter's name, which targeted "girls without friends." She even thought of keeping it anonymous and discreet so as not to scare away her marginalized clientele.

The mission was located at the corner of Bleury and Ontario streets (now President-Kennedy Avenue), in the Red Light District. It provided food, a community space and a safe place to rest.

At the time, the social work community treated sex workers as outcasts of society. Pinzer opted for compassionate services inspired by her own experience. She also served a vulnerable English-speaking population, in particular Protestants and Jews who had been neglected by the Catholic Church and its community services.

The mission was made possible by the financial support of donors, including her friend, wealthy American philanthropist Fanny Quincy Howe, with whom she corresponded for over a decade. The two women had met through Herbert Welsh, a Philadelphia social worker who in 1909 was helping Pinzer recover from her morphine addiction.

In 1917, Pinzer was forced to leave her apartment and close the shelter. This decision was due in part to a lack of funds and harassment by the police. However, she continued to help women on the phone and by visiting them.

The Maimie Papers

The story of Maimie Pinzer is immortalized in the book The Maimie Papers: Letters from an Ex-Prostitute, written by historian Ruth Rosen and published in 1977.

This book published part of the correspondence that Pinzer maintained from 1910 to 1922 with her friend Fanny Quincy Howe, an essayist and novelist from Boston, Massachusetts. In her handwritten letters, Pinzer told Howe about her troubled family relationships, her encounters with other marginalized people, and her daily struggles. She also asked for advice on her professional future.

The book bore witness to the life of an American woman from a humble origins who, at the turn of the 20th century, resigned herself to selling her body because of a lack of professional opportunities available to women.

Legacy

In 1995, the community organization by and for sex workers, Stella, l’amie de Maimie, was founded. The organization's name honours the social work of Maimie Pinzer and one of her protégés, Stella Philipps (née Stella Catherine Conway), a sex worker.

In 2023, a mural inspired by a photo of Pinzer with her dog Poke was painted in honour of the organization Stella, l’amie de Maimie. The mural is in an alley near the intersection of Fairmount and Parc in Montreal‘s Mile End neighbourhood.