“The image of the fortress-like building that was the Women’s House of Detention (1931-1974) in Greenwich Village, New York City, has stayed with me all these many years. Fifty years before I read Foucalt, this building and its inhabitants declared to me the connections between deviance, punishment and unrepentent desire… The prison was a presence in our lives—a warning, a beacon, a reminder and a moment of community.” - Joan Nestle

THE WOMEN’S HOUSE OF DETENTION is the story of one building: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired. Order now!

LISTEN TO MY CONVERSATION WITH TERRY GROSS ON FRESH AIR

PRAISE

“A fascinating, lively, and devastating story reverberates in the pages of The Women’s House of Detention. Hugh Ryan reveals the vital realities of people confined to the margins, whether behind the walls of the notorious House of D in the heart of the Village in Manhattan, or at the edges of complex communities in the tumult of twentieth-century New York City. Ryan’s engrossing and rigorous history of one jail documents an intersection of gender politics, evolving queer identity, and brutal racial repression, and is essential reading in a nation that now incarcerates 30 percent of the world’s women prisoners.”
―Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison

“Hugh Ryan’s crucial new book will change how you think about LGBTQ+ history…the most thorough collection of pre-Stonewall queer lives I’ve ever read.”―The Advocate

"Hugh Ryan is one of the most important historians of American life working today. The Women's House of Detention resets so many assumptions about American history, reminding us that the home of the free has always been predicated on the imprisonment of the vulnerable. Of vital importance to those interested in criminal justice reform, prison abolition, gender history, the history of sexuality and the history of poverty, as well as anyone who declares themselves knowledgeable about New York City history, this account does what history is supposed to—looking to the past to understand our broken present and possibly help us plan for a better future."―Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie

“A truly radical, moral, and exciting history that will blow your mind. Ryan argues that it was the creation of a women’s prison in the West Village that helped center lesbian life in that area. Since lesbians are poorer (no men’s incomes), de-facto marginalized, and more often deprived of family support, lesbians and queer women and trans men have also been overrepresented in prisons. Using records documenting poor, white, Black, and Latina women incarcerated for criminalized lives, Ryan shows us the profound injustices of prisons themselves, and how lesbians have been demeaned and yet tried to survive. A game changer from a community-based historian.”
―Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993

“In this essential, abolitionist work, historian and author of When Brooklyn Was Queer Hugh Ryan uncovers the stories of this bewildering place and of the people who populated it.”―Electric Literature

“A rigorously researched and compellingly told piece of queer history that features a memorable cast of heroic characters. Ryan squarely places his subject in the context of our contemporary society to illustrate the ugly and longstanding enactment of homo/transphobic terrorism by the carceral state.”
―Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

"Ryan dives into the archives created by those incarcerated in the House of D and the people who put them there, giving us the gift of rich context for these stories and countless hidden queer histories. Placing the prison in a quintessential queer community, The Women's House of Detention illuminates prisons as queer spaces and queer resistance through acts of autonomy, care, and collectivity, offering queer abolitionist organizers working to close jails and prisons across the country a glimpse into the long legacy they are living—and the inspiration to keep fighting until there are no more houses of detention."―Andrea Ritchie, co-author of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States

“Hugh Ryan has gifted us with a magnificent queer history of the notorious Women’s House of Detention in New York’s Greenwich Village that spans almost fifty years. With an astonishing gift for digging into archives, using their own letters and voices as much as he can, Ryan illuminates those whose lives were deemed ‘irredeemable.’ Stories that resonate with the humanity, resourcefulness, and loving of imprisoned Black, Puerto Rican, and working-class women are combined with those of political prisoners like Claudia Jones, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur, and Joan Bird. This meticulous work shines like a lighthouse beacon on a fog-shrouded shore. A brilliant achievement.”
―Bettina Aptheker, distinguished professor emerita of feminist studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

“In the 1950s and 1960s, I lived my femme lesbian life in the shadow of the Women’s House of D. In the bar that was home to me, parties were held to greet released lovers or to mourn new incarcerations. The Women’s House of Detention was the horizon of my early lesbian queer life; I have carried the voices of the separated lovers I heard in those hot summer streets all my years. In 1971, the building was erased from its Village corner, but Hugh Ryan refuses that erasure. These pages are thick with women and transmasculine people stepping back into our communal history, our national history. In this portrait of one prison’s life we can see the nation we have become and why, where mass incarcerations of Black, Brown, and poor people have taken genocidal proportions. Ryan uses new archival sources to emphasize the prison’s role in punishing nonconforming expressions of gender and love. Read this and you too will hear the lost voices reminding us both of their vitality, and of the work that still must be done. A needed, needed history.”
―Joan Nestle, author and founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives

“[A] thoroughly researched archival treasure.”
―them.

REVIEWS

Publisher's Weekly

Pull Quote: “Expertly mining prison records and other source materials, Ryan brings these marginalized women to vivid life. This informative, empathetic narrative is a vital contribution to LGBTQ history.”

Full Review: Historian Ryan (When Brooklyn Was Queer) delivers an immersive study of a New York City women’s prison that operated between 1929 and 1971. Contending that the House of D, as it was known, “helped make Greenwich Village queer, and the Village, in return, helped define queerness for America,” Ryan recovers the story of Charlotte B. (most last names are withheld), who fell in love with a fellow inmate while awaiting her arraignment for “waywardism” in 1934, and other queer and “transmasculine” prisoners. Though the inmates’ harsh treatment, including “dehumanizing” medical exams, provoked riots beginning in the 1950s, queer women remained segregated and were still required to wear a “D” (for degenerate) on their clothes. Contending that these experiences pushed queer women to resist labels and take pride in their sexuality, Ryan notes that by the 1960s, the House of D was publicly linked to queer behavior in Broadway musical lyrics and magazine articles, and explains how Black Panther member Afeni Shakur, incarcerated in 1969, connected Black Power with gay liberation. Expertly mining prison records and other source materials, Ryan brings these marginalized women to vivid life. This informative, empathetic narrative is a vital contribution to LGBTQ history.

Kirkus
Pull Quote: “Part history, part horror story, and part blistering critique of the country’s ‘criminal legal system’.”

Full Review: The neglected story of the “Skyscraper Alcatraz,” a notorious women’s prison where inmates included Angela Davis and Ethel Rosenberg.

As Ryan, the author of When Brooklyn Was Queer, demonstrates, for much of the 20th century, Greenwich Village was “the epicenter of women’s incarceration in New York, and the epicenter of queer life in America.” The author examines how the two realities intersected and rippled outward in an impressively researched study of the Women’s House of Detention. Ryan’s narrative is part history, part horror story, and part blistering critique of the country’s “criminal legal system” (a term he sees as more accurate than “criminal justice system”). Dubbed the House of D, the prison operated from 1929 until the early 1970s and was demolished after riots by inmates helped to expose its dangerously overcrowded and inhumane conditions. Although intended for short-term female prisoners awaiting trial or sentencing, the 11-story, vermin-infested building held “women and transmasculine people” for months or even years, crammed into small cells with no recreational, educational, or vocational programs and woeful medical care: “The dentist had so little time per prisoner that all he did, regardless of the complaint, was pull teeth,” writes Ryan. “There was no gynecologist, or any doctor at all on premises most nights and weekends.” The staff subjected new arrivals to forced enemas and other invasive procedures, overdrugged inmates with Thorazine, and for a time forced gender-nonconforming prisoners to wear a D for degenerate on their uniforms. In reconstructing this chilling history, Ryan had rare access to private social work files that enabled him to tell detailed personal stories of prisoners, who could be sent to the House of D for crimes such as “waywardism,” “wearing pants,” and “lesbianism itself.” While his narrative has strong LGBTQ+ interest, it also belongs on the shelf with books about judicial-system failures, such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.

A well-reconstructed history of one of America’s worst prisons for women.

Library Journal
Pull Quote: “While this book is ostensibly about the New York City Women’s House of Detention, Greenwich Village’s forgotten queer landmark, it is also about so much more. Ryan contextualizes the notorious prison in the realms of criminology, queer theory, women’s history, geography, and many other disciplines… This blend of queer history and social history is highly recommended.”

Full Review: While this book is ostensibly about the New York City Women’s House of Detention, Greenwich Village’s forgotten queer landmark, it is also about so much more. Historian Ryan (When Brooklyn Was Queer) contextualizes the notorious prison, which stood from 1929 to 1974, in the realms of criminology, queer theory, women’s history, geography, and many other disciplines. Ryan’s book relies on extensive archival research, especially with the Women’s Prison Association, and engagement with other primary sources; the oral histories, historical and contemporary, that he cites particularly stand out. Ryan describes the Women’s House of Detention as a grueling place—overcrowded and neglected—whose residents (cisgender women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people) were denigrated by nearly all elements of society; the fact that many were held or convicted on sexual offenses only led to further opprobrium. Many of these people were queer; some were famous. Organized chronologically, Ryan’s book integrates interesting academic studies and provokes readers to view the prison in its larger sociocultural context. His lucid writing takes the book out of the academic realm of prison history and opens it to a wider readership that will find many insights relevant to contemporary incarceration.

VERDICT: This blend of queer history and social history is highly recommended for all interested in learning about an often-overlooked landmark.

To read an early analysis of my research, check out this article I wrote for the Activist Review. And if you’d like to support and keep up to date with this project, join my Patreon.