Alumna Melissa McGrath spoke Wednesday night about the business she founded and the history of Bellingham, Wash., the town she lives in.

McGrath and a friend, Sara Holodnick, started a business, Good Time Girls, in Bellingham. They give tours of the town and share the history of the area’s prostitution. Prostitution was legal there for 90 years and was regulated by health officials and the police department.

“I really enjoy getting to talk to people that are trying to challenge their own ideas about how the world works and about how women should be treated,” McGrath said. “I like getting to have those conversations with people because they’re hard conversations to have.”

McGrath said she thought conversations about prostitution wouldn’t be received well by audiences, but that people wanted to talk about it because they wanted a better understanding of the history behind the legal prostitution that was in Bellingham.

“People paint a negative view of the women and the work they did, so it was interesting to see that there is a different view, that they didn’t all have bad lives,” said senior psychology major Sinai Dominguez.

In her speech, McGrath mentioned a woman who made a large amount of money as a prostitute, donated all of her money to the Bellingham College when she passed away, and now has a scholarship in her name.

“I learned all of the different ways that you can find out history. You can go to a courthouse or go to the police records, hospital records, cemetery records, all the different archives you can use to find information that are not things that we typically think about,” said Rebekah Guillotte, junior sociology major with a minor in women’s studies.