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Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain 1st Edition

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Deborah Cohen (Author)
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Deborah Cohen (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars 12 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0199977802
ISBN-10: 0199977801
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 400 pages
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (April 24, 2013)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0199977801
  • ISBN-13: 978-0199977802
  • Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 1.5 x 6.4 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #180,589 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsA formidable work of history that is well researched and written with a flair that is delightful and delectable!
By Amit Khemka on September 12, 2013
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
While Deborah Cohen's last book (Household Gods) centered around how the British handled their possessions, Family Secrets gets a lot more personal and delves deep into the world of adultery, illegitimacy, mental disability and homosexuality. Kudos to the author for taking such tabloid worthy topics and giving them the serious and considerate attention they deserve.

The British rule in India spawned a gluttony of mixed-race adulterous relationships that produced a whole generation of mixed-race kids and with them were born individual tales of betrayal, shame and sometimes even books that fabricated a whole childhood. With her meticulous use of the extraordinary archives of Normansfield along with numerous other sources, the author brings to life all these stories and helps us appreciate how a generation that once lived openly with the mentally disabled, and as openly raised the children of others gave way to a post Freudian world where secrets became an anathema and privacy a lawful right.

A Must Read!
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4.0 out of 5 starsA thorough look at who we think we are
By JET on April 16, 2016
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
This is a difficult read because there is a lot of repetition and many convoluted clauses.
But for all that, it's worth persisting with because it traverses in its academic way a broad spectrum of social history related to secrecy and privacy.
As the author says in her concluding pages, there has been screeds written about privacy, but not much scrutiny given to secrets of the kind that seem to exist in every family.
Her discourse examines the interrelationships between these oft-confused phenomena.
The work uses painstaking research to bring us a complete picture of how concepts of secrecy and privacy changed so utterly from Victorian times to today's extraordinary obsession with social media and revealing all.
Those interested in genealogy and researching their past kinships via internet pathways like Ancestry.com will be fascinated by the author's conclusions about this popular latter day pastime.
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3.0 out of 5 starsChequered family history
By reader 451 on June 2, 2013
Format: Hardcover
It is surely a feat of research to have been able to bring to light so many long-hidden family stories. Not only were these intended to remain secret, but the lives of ordinary people are rarely the object of the kind of record-keeping official acts attract. Deborah Cohen seems to have been able to force her way into hitherto close archives, such as the collected correspondence of the Normansfield institution for mentally handicapped children. Diaries, divorce court records, letters salvaged from attics somewhere form the rest of her sources, alongside press clippings and more conventional sociological literature. Family Secrets also has merit for the sheer curiosity, the prurient interest it manages to invoke. Ranging from the life stories of the mixed-race children of India Company officers to scandalous divorce cases of the late Victorian era, and to the hidden and illegal adoptions almost openly mediated by such institutions as the Mission of Hope in the 1920s, the book makes for good reading. The chapter on Normansfield and mentally handicapped children is particularly poignant. And the chapter on bachelor uncles, gay men concealing their sexual orientation, is the only one perhaps lacking in originality.

The problem with Family Secrets, however, has to do with its consistency as a cultural history book. The topics discussed change alongside the chronological framework, so that one type of family secret is never comparable to the next. It seems Cohen's wider point is that family privacy was respected under the Victorians because they had a strong sense of shame. This created a space for deviance from the norm, and could help people live with difference - in accepting a half-Indian sibling, for example, or providing at home for a mentally handicapped child.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsHow privacy and secrecy became distinct
By anonymous on July 23, 2013
Format: Hardcover
In this provocative book, Deborah Cohen explains why privacy and secrecy -- once basically interchangeable ideas -- came apart. She builds her argument from fascinating case studies of individual families. What she's interested in is a "history, told from within families, of how society changed." This is a wide-ranging, significant book:

Ch. 1: The family secrets of empire, especially Eurasian children whom their British fathers in the late eighteenth century sent back from India to families in England and Scotland.

Ch. 2: Stories from the Victorian Divorce Court, explaining why it became the "paradise for perjurers"

Ch. 3: Explains why Victorians did not hide children with learning disabilities but later generations did.

Ch. 4: Why adopting couples sought to keep adoption a secret from friends, neighbors and their children themselves.

Ch. 5: Draws on diaries from "bachelor uncles" to investigate how homosexuality became the open secret par excellence.

Ch. 6: Recasts 1930s-1950s as the first modern age of confession, with a focus on marriage counselling.

Ch. 7: When and why people first began to think about their parents as the root of their troubles.
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4.0 out of 5 starsWhat we don't tell our children.
By Frances S. Heales on April 28, 2014
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
This is a very interesting book, it discusses 'social misdeeds' of various kinds which we do not share with our families or close friends. One of the most usual 'secrets' is the birth of a child out of wedlock. The child may be abandoned or passed of as the offspring of other parents in the family. Keeping these secrets is often the reason behind various 'family stories'. Moral values have changed in the last two centuries, so some of these deeds have been uncovered and in the case of adopted children enabled them to find their birth parents. The subsequent meetings are not always happy as Mum may have married after the birth and adoption and does not want to complicate her current life by adding this earlier child.
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