Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life

by Tiffany Jenkins

Synopsis:

From ancient times to our digital present, Strangers and Intimates traces the dramatic emergence of private life, uncovering how it became a protected domain, cherished as a space for intimacy, self-discovery and freedom. In this sweeping history, Tiffany Jenkins, an acclaimed cultural historian, takes readers on an epic journey, from the strict separations of public and private in ancient Athens to the moral rigidity of the Victorian home, and from the feminists of the 1970s who declared that ‘the personal is political’ to the boundary-blurring demands of our digital age.

Strangers and Intimates is both a celebration of the private realm and a warning: as social media, surveillance and the expectations of constant openness reshape our lives, are we in danger of losing a part of ourselves? Jenkins reveals how privacy shaped the modern world and why it remains crucial for our personal and collective freedom – and why this freedom is now in mortal danger.

Today, as we share more than ever before and digital surveillance watches our every move, Jenkins asks a timely question: can private life survive the demands of the twenty-first century?

What does it mean to have a private life?

Tiffany Jenkins’ Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life is a history of privacy from the point where something we’d recognise as a concept of private life started to emerge (the rise of Protestantism) to more or less the present.

A lot of it wasn’t super surprising to me in terms of the facts and influences, but it was funny to think that we have less privacy now than we used to, and voluntarily so; I guess in the back of my head I knew it, but it hadn’t struck me so forcibly until now. Some of us (myself included) give up a lot of privacy by talking about all kinds of details on the internet that might never have been known fifty years ago. Sometimes that’s an improvement, allowing others to see they’re not alone and build communities and connections that could never otherwise have been made.

Sometimes… less so. I even wonder sometimes if reviewing every book I read like this is entirely good for me, and how many thoughts I even have that I keep up in my head just for myself. I know why I put everything out there (because then I have more control over the narrative about myself, a lesson learned in school when I was outed to everyone, and people read between the lines in horrible and unfair ways) — but this book did make me sit and wonder what it’d be like to be otherwise. (Look at me doing it right now, though!)

I guess somehow I hadn’t really thought about how flexible and changing our concept of “privacy” actually is, and how my definition of “privacy” is different to the previous generation’s, and very different to that of the generation before them. Following it through history like this has been fascinating and eye-opening.

I found the discussion of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in the context of the erosion of privacy a bit heart-rending, honestly. Mostly for her… but yeah, also for him. There was a world where his private life was just his private life, where politicians having affairs were irrelevant, and it perceptibly changed and in part it changed around him, for political expedience. It was a trend that was visible already, but… still. The book demonstrates clearly that we weren’t there yet then, and what happened to Clinton and Lewinsky changed things.

Lots of food for thought here, and thank goodness, numbered citations, a bibliography, and an index.

Rating: 5/5 (“loved it”)