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

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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 women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people who inhabited its crowded cells. Some of these inmates-Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur-were famous, but the vast majority were incarcerated for the crimes of being poor and improperly feminine. Today, approximately 40 percent of the people in women''s prisons identify as queer; in earlier decades, that percentage was almost certainly higher.

Historian Hugh Ryan explores the roots of this crisis and reconstructs the little-known lives of incarcerated New Yorkers, making a uniquely queer case for prison abolition-and demonstrating that by queering the Village, the House of D helped defined queerness for the res