Criminology Commons^™

Where Were The Lesbians In The Stonewall Riots? The Women’S House Of Detention & Lesbian Resistance, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

Where were the lesbians in the Stonewall Riots? They were jailed in the House of Detention for Women in Greenwich Village, New York City, two blocks away from the Stonewall Inn. Lesbians in the Women's House of Detention shouted from the windows to the rioters in the streets below, fueling the momentum of the Stonewall uprising. The women's prison was a site of lesbian confinement and resistance that inspired the 1969 uprising in Greenwich Village.

Polly Thistlethwaite is Chief Librarian at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She volunteered at the Lesbian Herstory Archives 1986 – 1997.

How Porous Are The Walls That Separate Us?: Transformative Service-Learning, Women’S Incarceration, And The Unsettled Self, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

In this article, we refine a politics of thinking from the margins by exploring a pedagogical model that advances transformative notions of service learning as social justice teaching. Drawing on a recent course we taught involving both incarcerated women and traditional college students, we contend that when communication among differentiated and stratified parties occurs, one possible result is not just a view of the other but also a transformation of the self and other. More specifically, we suggest that an engaged feminist praxis of teaching incarcerated women together with college students helps illuminate the porous nature of fixed markers that …