Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern BritainWe live today in a culture of full disclosure, where tell-all memoirs top the best-seller lists, transparency is lauded, and privacy seems imperiled. But how did we get here? Exploring scores of previously sealed records, Family Secrets offers a sweeping account of how shame--and the relationship between secrecy and openness--has changed over the last two centuries in Britain. Deborah Cohen uses detailed sketches of individual families as the basis for comparing different sorts of social stigma. She takes readers inside an Edinburgh town house, where a genteel maiden frets with her brother over their niece's downy upper lip, a darkening shadow that might betray the girl's Eurasian heritage; to a Liverpool railway platform, where a heartbroken mother hands over her eight-year old illegitimate son for adoption; to a town in the Cotswolds, where a queer vicar brings to his bank vault a diary--sewed up in calico, wrapped in parchment--that chronicles his sexual longings. Cohen explores what families in the past chose to keep secret and why. She excavates the tangled history of privacy and secrecy to explain why privacy is now viewed as a hallowed right while secrets are condemned as destructive. In delving into the dynamics of shame and guilt, Family Secrets explores the part that families, so often regarded as the agents of repression, have played in the transformation of social mores from the Victorian era to the present day. Written with compassion and keen insight, this is a bold new argument about the sea-changes that took place behind closed doors. |
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adoptive parents adultery Alexander Colvin Anatole James Annie’s baby birth certificate Blakeley Britain British brother Bruce to John Cambridge child Cochrane’s collusion conceal confession counselor Cresswell daughter decade Dering Diary Divorce Court early Elizabeth England Eurasian family secrets family’s father feebleminded Francis Fowke Frank Fowke friends Harriett History Hollond homosexual Hugh Cudlipp husband illegitimacy illegitimate India institution interwar Jeremy Wolfenden John Bruce John Langdon Kornitzer Letter to Miss Litchfields lived London Lord man’s Margaret Margaret Benn married mentally disabled middleclass Miss Hart Mission of Hope mixedrace mother never Normansfield one’s Oswin Peter Cochrane Peter Wildeblood Queen’s Proctor queer R.D. Laing Raheim Bibi Reginald LangdonDown Report Richard Blake Brown Robert Bruce Rupert CroftCooke ScottSanderson secrecy sexual shame sister social society son’s sought Susan took twentieth century Victorian visited White Mughals wife Wolfenden Wolfenden Report women workingclass World wrote young