A closet of one’s own

We all need privacy – to misspeak, to err, to be intimate

To hold one opinion but voice another, is this inauthentic? To conduct oneself as if one is being permanently surveilled, does that help democratic life? In her book Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life , British sociologist Tiffany Jenkins traverses centuries, to explain how the private and the public developed into two distinct realms, and how this historic achievement is now in mortal danger.

Spark of conscience | From the Protestant iconoclasm of Martin Luther to the extensive adventurism of Henry VIII, the 16th century germinated the independence of ‘inward things’ from traditional authority. Hobbes’s 1651 magnum opus Leviathan presented hypocrisy – the gap between public utterance and private belief – as key to pro tecting the social order from anarchy. The 1650 Toleration Act passed by Cromwell’s parliament made strides towards making religion a private matter.

Age of separations | The first modernbiography, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), the first modern autobiography, Rousseau’s Confessions (1782), the first novel, Richardson’s Pamela (1740), literacy rate for men in London approaching 80%, it was all of a piece with thinking for oneself. Simultaneous to the strengthening private sphere, was the rise of public life. Coffee houses were popping up everywhere. These were a male space, like the Atheninan agora. Male and female roles became sharply different. A woman effectively became her husband’s property when she married.

In 1801 the first census rolled out after an acrimonious five-decade resistance that it would ‘molest and perplex every single family in the kingdom’. Drawing the line between a public realm open to state intervention and a private domain beyond it became the question of the age.

Across the pond, the scepticism that met govt-led research was belied by the enthusiasm that met George Gallup, who founded his polling company in 1935. Americans liked answering questions about themselves and reading the results. As Kinsey discovered, they were also more than ready to share their sex ‘histories’. Bernays’ Propaganda (1928) proposed ‘the engineering of consent’, whereby these masses could be controlled by an ‘invisible’ govt, with insights from psychology and natural science.

The personal is the political | This was Betty Friedan, Kate Millett and other second-wave feminists’ counter to the ‘interior colonisation’ of women. But politicising the private sphere also meant depoliticising the public sphere. Redirecting scrutiny from social and economic structures of society to personal relationships placed an intolerable burden on everyone involved in such political practice,the book argues.

Relatedly, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s criticism of the Roe vs Wade ruling was that abortion rights should not be a privacy issue but a matter of equal rights. Either way, the public-private separation forged in the 18th century weakened by the end of the 1970s.

Let’s talk about sex | Monica Lewinsky’s was the first massive news story to break online. The Kenneth Starr report was accessed by 20mn Americans within 48 hours of its release. Fast forward to the normalisation of Pornhub and OnlyFans as examples of ‘creator economy’.

By now, threats to privacy are almost exclusively framed in terms of data and digital security. But, the book underlines, the protection of individual privacy ultimately depends on a clear boundary between private and public domains, which must be defended both online and offline. Strangers are not intimates. Why treat them like that? Protect your inner life instead.