The Women's House of Detention

By Hugh Ryan,

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

Book description

CrimeReads, Best True Crime Books of the Year

This singular 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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Women's House of Detention as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I read The Women’s House of Detention earlier this year and was introduced in its pages to a world of pre-Stonewall policing of queerness and transness. In our current moment, when state laws increasingly seek to restrict the lives of gender-expansive people, this book offers a window into both the origin of these laws and also, importantly, into the lives of queer and trans people who, in their resistance, created space for me to exist, and to name my own existence, today.

From Morgan's list on folks seeking genderqueer ancestry.

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