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

ISBN: 1645036650

Author: Ryan, Hugh

Condition: New

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 Womens House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of womens imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York Citys 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 Womens 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.