The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison

By Hugh Ryan

Book Overview

This "crucial" (The Advocate) and "compelling" (BuzzFeed) history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century.

The Women's House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women's imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City's Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of individuals who inhabited its crowded cells.

Historian Hugh Ryan reconstructs the little-known lives of these incarcerated New Yorkers, making a uniquely queer case for prison abolition--and demonstrating that by queering the Village, the House of Detention helped define queerness for the rest of America. From the lesbian communities forged through the Women's House of D to the turbulent prison riots that presaged Stonewall, this is the story of one building and much more: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1645036669
• ISBN13: 9781645036661
• Release Date: May 2022
• Publisher: Bold Type Books
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.7" x 8.8"