# The Women’s House of Detention

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/hugh-ryan/the-womens-house-of-detention/9781645036661

![The Women’s House of Detention](https://quivercdn.com/covers/bold-type-books/hugh-ryan/the-womens-house-of-detention_978-16-4503-666-1.jpg?v=2026-05-09%2002%3A24%3A05)

- Book: [The Women’s House of Detention](https://www.bookquiver.com/hugh-ryan/the-womens-house-of-detention) ([The Women’s House of Detention.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/hugh-ryan/the-womens-house-of-detention.md))
- Authors: [Hugh Ryan](https://www.bookquiver.com/hugh-ryan)
- Publisher: bold_type_books
- ISBN: 978-16-4503-666-1
- Pages: 1
- Published: 2022-06-02
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Hardcover

## Description

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 of queer and trans incarceration, connecting misogyny, racism, state-sanctioned sexual violence, colonialism, sex work, and the failures of prison reform. And he reconstructs the little-known lives of hundreds of incarcerated New Yorkers, making a uniquely queer case for prison abolition in the process. From the lesbian communities forged through the House of D to the turbulent prison riots that presaged Stonewall, this is the story of one building and so much more-the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired.