Presented by Rare Books LA at Los Angeles Union Station: ejected from polite society, three generations of courtesans turned the scandalous memoir into a genre of their own, exposing the hypocrisy of the men around them and reclaiming the worth of women that history tried to erase. This one-hour talk traces how these “learned ladies and notorious whores” wrote themselves back into the record, and asks what their confessions still reveal about power, reputation, and who gets to tell their own story.