Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain by Deborah Cohen (review)

Not many people find anything of interest in Croydon, a proverbially dull swathe of suburbia to the south of London. However, Deborah Cohen has, and uses some fascinating material from the Croydon local studies archive for at least one of her chapters on adoption in this wide-ranging study of secrecy and privacy in the British family over the last two centuries. The book sets out to show “what families attempted to hide in the past and why” (1), aiming to illustrate the part that families played “in the transformation of social mores” (2) over this period. This is a fairly daunting task to set yourself, and although the book is original and many of the stories in it are powerful, heartbreaking and very well told, it does not always work in the manner intended.

It could be said that there are two main approaches to the history of the modern self and its secrets: the first suggests that the decline of communal ties and the emergence of privacy, together with the rise of the idea of universal rights, has expanded the sphere of the personal, thereby licensing a kind of obsession with identity, selfhood and confession. In that reading, we have become more and more open—more free according to many writers—and more willing to disclose the most intimate details of our lives, while both secrecy and privacy have declined to the point of nothingness in the age of mass communication and, latterly, digital technology. The other, more critical version of this story derives from Foucault, who argued that the modern world has seen the development of countless mechanisms for extracting the “truth of the self.” Confessing secrets, in that interpretation, indicates the scene of discipline and surveillance, denoting (and concealing) the ever-more intense process of “individualisation and totalisation.”

Cohen doesn’t commit herself to either of these (or any version of them, though perhaps she inclines more to the former), and instead the book offers a series of instances in which family secrets play a key role in the process of social change. The first of these is an account of the mixed-race daughters of Scottish Indian army officers, which shows us that in the late eighteenth century it was acceptable to try and get your (secretly) mixed-race and illegitimate daughter to pass in Scottish society, but by the 1850s it was not. The divorce court is also a key element in the story of uncovering family secrets, as after a series of scandalous cases in the 1850s, it became vital to prevent collusion between husbands and wives who both wanted to divorce. To prevent the development of a de facto no fault divorce, the courts inquired every more deeply into the marital secrets of both parties. Although all this was reported in the press at great length, we are left wondering why these cases (and not others, or those dealing with other crimes or sins) were so important. However, the book really hits its stride in Part Two, with a discussion of the “feeble-minded” children of the nineteenth century who were increasingly institutionalised as the century wore on. As long as most people had large families, Cohen suggests, disability was generally contained within them, but with the rise of the smaller family and of eugenic arguments about heredity, it became increasingly shameful to have a disabled child as any mental or physical impairment began to be seen as tainting the family as a whole. The result was the increasing abandonment of middle class children to institutions, where they remained, generally unvisited by their families, a situation that continued right into the 1960s. The other great chapter is on adoption, which although widely practiced, had no legal status until 1926. Until then mothers had the right to reclaim any privately adopted child, although they seldom knew this or were in a position to assert their rights. Even when adoption was legalised, the mother’s...