Why read The Women's House of Detention?

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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American history

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Why read it?

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

Valena Beety

Author

I was volunteering with the Appalachian Prison Book Project when Hugh Ryan’s book came out.

Suddenly, The Women’s House of Detention was everywhere—RuPaul’s Drag Race, Fresh Air, mainstream news—yet Hugh was willing to do a virtual book talk with volunteers in West Virginia who provide books to incarcerated people. The book tells the history of a prison 500 feet from the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, and the women and transgender individuals who were incarcerated there because of their gender performance and sexual orientation.

Hugh Ryan lays out how women were arrested for going out at night…

From Valena's list on The best books to learn about wrongful convictions of women and queer people.

Morgan Thomas

Author

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 The best books for folks seeking genderqueer ancestry.