Owning Up

This book argues that from its beginning the U.S. discourse on privacy has been couched in terms of violation and dispossession, so that even as 19th-century Americans came to regard privacy as a natural right and to identify it with sacred ideals of democratic freedom and individuality, they also understood it as always at risk. Focusing on biographical and autobiographical writing by and about Margaret Fuller, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Keckley, and Louisa May Alcott, this study traces the public narrative of imperiled privacy across five decades. Its argument begins from the premise that 19th-century conceptions of privacy became meaningful only in negative relation to the encroaching forces of market capitalism and commodification. Where previous studies treat privacy as a stable category whose defining features are middle-class domesticity and femininity, this book contends that privacy is an empty category that lacks fixed content and requires constant rearticulation through panic narratives in which gender always operates in intersection with race. Chapters look at how the discourse of imperiled privacy develops in conjunction with ideologies of Romantic idealism, antebellum reform, racial reconstruction, possessive individualism, and social Darwinist laissez-faire, and culminates at the end of the century in calls for legislation to protect the American individual's “right to be let alone.”

Geography · American History and Culture · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Literature: history, themes, analysis · 19th century · American literature · American prose literature · American prose literature, women authors · American Women authors · Authors · Authors, american · Autobiography · Autobiography, women authors · biography · History · History and criticism · Philosophy · Privacy · Privacy in literature · united states · Women authors · Women authors, American

• Privacy

  John David Zuern•a/b Auto/Biography Studies•2017

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• Nudity and other sensitive states

  Justine S Murison•American Literature•2017

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