These women’s prisons believed there were only three legitimate jobs a woman could have: wife, maid, or nursemaid. For any of those jobs, a woman needed to be properly feminine (in the eyes of white Victorians). Any woman deemed not feminine enough (too masculine, too sexual, too willful, too Black, etc.) would inevitably end up unmarried and out of work, at which point she would become a prostitute. For this reason, reformers spent the late 1800s and the early 1900s developing a system of “women’s justice” that targeted women at younger ages and for smaller offenses, in order to get them into prisons where they would be forcibly feminized. As the annual report of the first women’s prison in America put it in 1875, their job was “to take these [women] and so remold, reconstruct and train them, as to be fitted to occupy the position assigned them by God, viz., wives, mothers, and educators of children” — a sentiment not far off from that expressed in a report on prostitution and the Women’s Court put together for Mayor LaGuardia in 1934, which stated that the best way to reform arrested women was “wholesome marriage and the responsibility for children.”
By 1929, Black lady lovers were becoming so visible in Harlem that the powerful and popular pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., delivered one of the first known sermons that singled out the harm caused by queer women. The New York Age reported he declared, “homo-sexuality and sex perversion among women” has “grown into one of the most horrible debasing, alarming and damning vices of present day civilization.” Powell “asserted that it is not only prevalent to an unbelievable degree but that it is increasing day by day.” This shows the community pushback that accompanied the increasing awareness of Black women in Harlem who sought relationships with other women.
In the city of New York from the 1930s to the 1990s, Irish attorney Paul O’Dwyer was a fierce and enduring presence in courtrooms, on picket lines, and in contests for elected office. He was forever the advocate of the downtrodden and marginalized, fighting not only for Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland but for workers, radicals, Jews, and African Americans and against the Vietnam War.
The War Brought Home: The Greenwich Village Townhouse Explosion of 1970
By Brendan Mahoney
The Weather Underground (Weathermen) rose from the dust as the pallbearers of the now deceased SDS and dying anti-war movement. This group sought to destroy many of the white, bourgeois remnants of the SDS, abandoning electoral and peaceful tactics in favor of guerrilla warfare, with solidarity across racial lines. Their motivation was to bring the war home. In plain terms that meant bringing the destruction and chaos that the US war machine had brought to the people in Vietnam and elsewhere, into the United States.
“‘The World’s Most Arrested Lesbian:’ Corona Rivera and the New York Gay Activists Alliance, 1970-72.” An Interview with Marc Stein
Interviewed By Ben Serby
I think historians of LGBTQ+ activism should become more familiar with Corona’s story because it’s fascinating in and of itself, but also because it might change the way we think about the history of GAA-New York and the broader history of LGBTQ+ activism in the 1970s. More generally, I think GAA-New York was responsible for one of the most creative and powerful waves of direct action ever seen in the United States, with lessons for LGBTQ+ and other activists today. Corona was a leading GAA-New York activist for two years and we should know more about her.
In 1849, riots, including theater riots, were nothing new in New York, and the Astor Place tragedy came in an era of profound social unrest in New York. But the city’s militaristic response—opening fire on civilians—was something new, and armed violence, or the threat of it, was used again and again in the wake of Astor Place […]
The Case of Ernest Gallashaw: Achieving Justice in an Earlier Era of White-Backlash Politics
By Robert Polner and Michael Tubridy
The episode proved to be a revelatory moment in a city whose conceit of tolerance was belied by stark economic inequality as well as segregation in housing, employment and schools. Now virtually forgotten, the eruption on poor and working-class streets 15 miles from City Hall was—and still remains—historically significant for signaling New York City’s seething racial tensions and the potential for intense right-wing reaction.
Astor Place, though barely five hundred feet long, is a hectic street of cafes and stores, with the bustling Astor Place subway station as the centerpiece and Cooper Union at its eastern end. But 175 years ago this month, the state militia confronted an angry mob on Astor Place and blood was spilled. It was one of the deadliest riots in New York’s history. How did it happen, and why did it happen there?
Policing the World from New York City: How Policing Changed from 1880 to 1920
A Collaboration with Public Books: Matthew Guariglia, interviewed by Emily Brooks
From the 1880s to the 1940s, New York City was transformed—and so too was the New York City Police Department. This is the second of two interviews—published in collaboration with Public Books—where Matthew Guariglia and Emily Brooks discuss this pivotal era, through their exciting new books on the NYPD. The first interview was published on Public Books. You can read it here.
Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City
Review By Douglas Flowe
This work is not only timely but reflective of growing scholarship on law enforcement that places New York City front and center; rightfully so considering how influential Gotham is in terms of law enforcement and penology. With resources like the La Guardia papers, court record books, oral histories, and NAACP papers from the Library of Congress, Brooks has crafted a major contribution to the history of the often overlooked mid-twentieth century development of America’s criminal justice system; a story that will be relevant to all students of law, urban history, criminality, and twentieth-century politics.
