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Summary:

"We 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."--Publisher's website.

Table of Contents:

• The Nabob's secrets
• Revelation in the divorce court
• Children who disappeared
• Other people's bastards
• Bachelor uncles
• Talking it out
• The repressive family
• Epilogue: genealogy and confessional culture.

Author/Creator:

Cohen, Deborah, 1968- , author

Languages:

English

Language Notes:

Item content: English

Main Work:

Family secrets: shame and privacy in modern Britain [by Cohen, D.]

Other Related Resources:

Print version: Family secrets [by Cohen, D.] (Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, [2013] — ISBN 9780199977802; LCCN 2012041008; OCLC Number 811599682)

Subjects:

Family secrets — Great Britain — Case studies

Families — Great Britain — Case studies

Privacy — Great Britain — Case studies

Illegitimacy — Great Britain — Case studies

Homosexuality — Great Britain — Case studies

Disabilities — Great Britain — Case studies

Family secrets

Families

Privacy

Illegitimacy

Homosexuality

Disabilities

Great Britain

Genres:

Case studies

General Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Description based on: Print version record.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 372 pages) : illustrations

Digital Characteristics:

text file

Call Numbers:

HQ613 .C64 2013eb

ISBNs:

9780199985623 (electronic bk.)
0199985626 (electronic bk.)
9780199977802 (alk. paper) [Invalid]
0199977801 (alk. paper) [Invalid]

Library of Congress Control Numbers:

2012041008 [Invalid]

OCLC Numbers:

840416986