Thinking Reflexively About Privacy and Secrecy in History

Much of my research centres on the blurry lines between public and private in the mid-twentieth century. My thesis and ongoing research on working-class homes finds that the boundaries between these two binary states were more fluid than contemporaries were prepared to admit. Most significantly, privacy, and perceptions of it in the homes and lives of working-class people, by middle-class authorities, was classed.

In her book on family secrets, Deborah Cohen highlights the meaning of privacy as transforming in the twentieth century to mean something other than secrecy. The two concepts moved apart from each other, she says. (Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: The Things We Tried to Hide (London, Penguin, 2013) pp. xiii-xvi) She also argues that keeping family secrets is a practice that belongs to the past. The nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries were the times when secrecy was important, protecting a family’s reputation and respectability from some private shame. [Ibid.] But what does that mean for a family secret that was kept in the last decades of the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first? And what does family secrecy, and the respectability it seeks to protect, mean to the way I, as a researcher and historian, do history and research? I have a lot to say about this subject, not least because I was a family secret.

At my viva voce examination in February my internal examiner Lucy Robinson encouraged me to think more reflexively about my research and what my self and my experiences do to the way I do history and the way I approach my sources. This isn’t easy. But I’ve been going through some things in my personal life in the last year that have absolutely had an impact on my work, and Lucy’s feedback has really helped me to think reflexively about what it means for my work to deal with these issues. This blog post uses some of this personal ‘stuff’ to think through how I approach different types of historical sources.

I came to academia and academic history through family history, as one of my previous blog posts explains. (See here: http://domesticmurdershewrote.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/the-first-house-i-ever-researched-no.html ) I’m all too aware of many of the distinctions between types of family and local history and academic history, and the distances that there can be between the university or the academy and more public histories. As Alison Light points out:

‘Professional historians have generally given family history short shrift. It’s ‘history lite’ or ‘comfort-zone history’: solipsistic and myopic. Its practitioners, critics say, are only interested in themselves. The family history we choose to write, the past we believe in, is always a selection of stories from the many at our disposal in the past. Family history individualizes but it can also privatize, make us feel more singular.’ (Alison Light, Common People (London, Penguin, 2014) p. xxvii.)

I’ve already thought a lot about what starting at family history has meant to my academic research and writing. At the European Social Science History Conference in Valencia in March-April this year, the first panel I went to (See here for my blog post about the conference: http://domesticmurdershewrote.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/from-my-notebook-esshc2016.html ) described research techniques I recognised as being the bread and butter of genealogists: detailed research into the lives and locations of individuals and their families. Except in this context it was described as a ‘prosopographical approach’, enriching the pages of works like Helen Johnston, Barry Godfrey, and David J. Cox’s Victorian Convicts: 100 Criminal Lives (Barnsley, Pen and Sword, 2016), for example.

But one of the differences between prosopography and genealogy is that the latter is more self-conscious in its selection of people and sources to research. Light quotes Raphael Samuel ‘We all have half a dozen possible ancestries to choose from, and fantasy and projections can furnish us with a dozen more’ (Light, Common People, p. xxviii). In my own, pre-academia, genealogical research I prioritised my East Anglian and Lithuanian ancestors, plotting my maternal ancestry in great detail and ignoring that of my Lincolnshire and Yorkshire paternal side. I felt very little connection to those ancestors. Despite being given a copy of a carefully and lovingly hand-drawn family tree researched in detail pre-internet by my paternal grandmother, I hadn’t received memories or stories passed down from that side. I couldn’t ask for context, or photos, or ask if ‘we’ took after any of them like I could ask my maternal grandparents.

I would like to think that my approach is more democratic as Historian than it was as Family Historian. When I’m researching people in cases of domestic crime I often use genealogical sources, sometimes out of my own sheer curiosity, to see what information exists for them. I have found that some of the wealthier characters who feature in my thesis have family links with royalty, with newspaper moguls, with famous people, and these relationships affected what was published about them in print at the time. So press embargoes are nothing new, a point Adrian Bingham describes in his history of newspapers. (Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press 1918-1978 (Oxford, OUP, 2009).) In another case I found that a descendant of a woman murdered by her husband was searching for answers about what happened in the case, appealing for information on an online forum. (I pointed them to the file at the National Archives and some relevant newspaper articles.) My prosopographical research (if it can be called that) into the lives of individuals in the cases has enriched my understanding of them but I have not been selective in my research. I haven’t erased anyone, though I’ve been respectful of the privacy of living relatives by anonymising cases as much as possible, as I know that my thesis will one day be available via Open Access.

However, secrets, including family secrets, and the differential treatment they are accorded, revealed in the files stand out to me like beacons. For example, in the case involving a wealthy heiress her drug use is evident in the private files but kept from the public newspaper coverage. In contrast, the homes of working-class and black people who were suspected of consuming drugs were described as ‘drug dens’. These differences are crystal clear to me and I compare them to what I hope is great effect in my writing. Another example is working class Northern girl Moira, who married her boyfriend in the late 1950s when she became pregnant with their child. When Moira was born in the 1940s, her own mother had been similarly young, and given Moira to her mother to bring up as her own. Thus, Moira grew up and died thinking her grandmother was her mother and her mother was her sister, the secret only revealed in court after Moira was killed by her husband. Deborah Cohen describes family secrets like these as belonging to this period to preserve respectability. She describes them as a thing of the past, with families helping to change what is regarded as respectable over the twentieth century, and secrets being no longer necessary to keep (Cohen, Family Secrets, pp. xi-xvi). Illegitimacy, or pregnancy before marriage, is no longer a shameful secret, for example. But is it?

I was a family secret. Illegitimate. For years I simply didn't exist. As Deborah Cohen correctly points out ‘family secrets interrupt truth, deforming identity.’ (Cohen, Family Secrets, p. xii) My identity, even after I stopped being a secret, was deformed. Now I exist. I'm not a secret anymore. But only one story of my identity has been told. And that version isn't mine.

As historians we rely on written sources, on official documents that are considered important enough to be preserved. But what about personal conversations and relationships? These are not written down. Behind every police interview there are a thousand words unrecorded. The record of every relationship is re-written after it ends. Warm feelings are minimised or denied in light of uncovered secrets and betrayals. What happened then is covered over by the context of what is happening now. This is particularly evident in cases of murder. When men killed their wives in the mid-twentieth century they gave narratives of their marriages that fitted with the contemporary understanding of manslaughter over murder. They described small problems over long periods that built up and up until they reached a critical moment of violence. Otherwise happy marriages were reframed to make husbands less culpable in their wives’ murders. With my own experiences in mind, I take nothing for granted. To me, these records can never give a ‘truthful’ account of a relationship. We have only the surviving spouses framing of the marriage.

Another example of my approach being influenced by my personal experiences, is my analysis of photographs. The last panel I attended at the European Social Science History Conference was on the subject of family photographs. What can family photographs and films tell us about the past? How can they be historicized? How can they be used by historians? My own experiences make me highly sceptical of family photographs, of any photographs, because for every happy family group or home they show someone is always excluded, even if it is only the person behind the camera. As Stuart Hall describes, even private family photos are constructed to represent some notion of respectability, affluence or honour (Stuart Hall, ‘Reconstruction Work: Images of Postwar Black Settlement,’ in James Proctor (ed.) Writing Black Britain, 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Manchester, MUP, 2000), pp. 82–94). There exist a thousand family photos of which I am not a part. 

Public photographers like Roger Mayne, depicted working-class people as having vibrant street lives rather than quiet and private domestic lives. (See Stephen Brooke, 'Revisiting Southam Street: Class, Generation, Gender, and Race in the Photography of Roger Mayne', Journal of British Studies, 53:02 (2014), pp. 453-496.) This is why the photographs of domestic crime scenes I use are so precious, so unique. However, police and courts sought to frame working-class homes in the photos as somehow culpable in the crimes that took place there. Perhaps because I know from personal experience that photographs do not necessarily show what captions or first glances suggest, I am able to question and contest the judgements that are made about peoples’ private domestic lives from photographs of working-class homes.

Secrets are classed, says Cohen. Only those with a respectable veneer to preserve need to keep them. ‘Keeping a secret, like keeping a servant, was one way, then, to define the middle class.’ (Cohen, Family Secrets, p. xviii). Talking about one's troubles is also classed, she says, it makes one ‘rough’ rather than respectable. (And don't I know it!) ‘Does my reflexivity embarrass you?’ asks Lucy Robinson. Does this blog post make for uncomfortable reading? Does it fit with serious academic discussion, or is it akin to a ‘misery memoir’? Am I ‘rough’ for ‘airing my dirty laundry’ this way? Or does this post function as a way to think reflexively about the ways and means history affects us, and how we affect history?

Postscript: This blog post was created in May 2016. In 2017 I've removed some content because it is time to move on. Though my personal experiences have shaped my approach to historical research, it is the approach that I carry forward with me. Some things from my past belong there: they are history.