Public vs private: history behind closed doors

Summary

History Extra Podcast Summary: "Public vs Private: History Behind Closed Doors"

Release Date: May 1, 2025
Host: Lauren Good
Guest: Tiffany Jenkins, Writer, Cultural Historian, and Broadcaster
Book Discussed: "Strangers and Intimates" by Tiffany Jenkins

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Introduction: Exploring the Boundaries of Public and Private Life

In this engaging episode of the History Extra Podcast, Lauren Good hosts Tiffany Jenkins to delve into the intricate history of public and private life as explored in Jenkins' book, Strangers and Intimates. The conversation seeks to understand how the lines between public and private spheres have evolved over centuries, shaping societal norms and individual behaviors.

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1. The Origins and Evolution of Privacy

Jenkins' Exploration of Privacy: Tiffany Jenkins begins by expressing her fascination with the concepts of privacy and secrecy, highlighting that contemporary discussions often center around technology and social media. However, she emphasizes that the valuation of privacy has deep historical roots.

• Quote:
  "Privacy is not natural. It's something that you have to define and fight for that. It's bigger than just digital privacy." [38:30]

Historical Misconceptions: Contrary to popular belief, privacy didn't emerge solely from domestic innovations like curtains or property laws in the 18th century. Instead, Jenkins posits that the concept of privacy accidentally arose from individuals' attempts to separate themselves from authoritative entities like the church and the monarchy.

• Quote:
  "They end up accidentally creating this private sphere." [20:23]

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2. Public and Private Spheres in Ancient Athens

Sharp Delineation: In 5th century Athens, society exhibited a stark separation between the public and private realms. The public sphere, epitomized by areas like the Acropolis and the agora, was exclusively for male free citizens. Women and slaves were relegated to the private domain, which was often viewed negatively.

• Quote:
  "The public realm was venerated, the private realm was denigrated." [03:33]

Diogenes' Transgressions: Jenkins references the philosopher Diogenes, who famously blurred these boundaries by engaging in typically private acts in public spaces, challenging societal norms.

• Quote:
  "Diogenes was basically saying, your venerated public realm is not as great as you might think." [05:23]

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3. The Role of Women in Public and Private Spheres

18th-Century Britain: Jenkins discusses the case of the Duchess of Devonshire in 1784, who publicly campaigned for Charles Fox to become MP in Westminster. Her actions were met with severe backlash, as society deemed her transgression into the public sphere inappropriate for women.

• Quote:
  "Women at that time who would transgress and come out of it were often put in their place and told to go back to childrearing." [05:52]

Double Standards and Feminist Resistance: Prominent women like Mary Wollstonecraft challenged these norms, advocating for the education and participation of women in public life, thereby laying the groundwork for future feminist movements.

• Quote:
  "Mary Wollstonecraft would argue that actually they have both the rational capacity for public life." [07:29]

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4. The Transformation of Privacy in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Rise of Biographies and Personal Lives: The 18th century witnessed the burgeoning of modern biography, exemplified by Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. This shift indicated a growing public interest in the private lives of notable figures.

• Quote:
  "Boswell's biography gives this sense of the man and the self being important." [11:42]

Literature and Domesticity: Novels by authors like Jane Austen began to celebrate domestic life, embedding the value of the private sphere into the cultural consciousness.

• Quote:
  "Domesticity doesn't become recognized and valued into the end of that century." [16:24]

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5. The Interplay Between Public Culture and Domestic Architecture

Architectural Changes: Jenkins highlights how architectural developments mirrored the evolving boundaries between public and private life. The introduction of corridors and the delineation of rooms within homes fostered a sense of intimacy and separation from the outside world.

• Quote:
  "Curtains were drawn, cushions were plumped, and the home began to embody this sense of separation, intimacy." [16:24]

Social Life and Public Spaces: The proliferation of coffee houses and public institutions like the British Museum facilitated a culture where private ideas were shared in communal settings, further delineating the public-private divide.

• Quote:
  "Coffee houses helped demarcate begins with mercantile society." [28:56]

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6. Community Oversight and Regulation of Private Behavior

Bawdy Courts and Public Shame: Before the solidification of private spheres, communities actively regulated personal behavior through institutions like bawdy courts, where acts such as adultery were prosecuted and publicly shamed.

• Quote:
  "If you didn't, you could, I think, be accused of bawdy, which is effectively encouraging lavishness and poor behavior." [22:59]

Impact on Women: Women faced heightened scrutiny, with societal expectations forcing them to adhere to strict moral codes, often policing their own bodies and behaviors.

• Quote:
  "Women's breasts would be felt to see if they were pregnant or not." [26:19]

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7. The Shift Towards Valuing the Private Sphere

Freedom of Conscience: Jenkins argues that the development of concepts like freedom of conscience in the 16th to 18th centuries inadvertently fostered the private sphere by advocating for individual beliefs separate from state or church control.

• Quote:
  "Freedom of conscience firmly separates the state and the individual." [18:57]

Validation of Private Life: By the end of the 18th century, both public and private spheres gained equal validation, with private life increasingly celebrated through literature and societal norms.

• Quote:
  "Private and public like a dance with one another." [last part of section 5]

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8. Modern Implications: Technology and the Blurred Lines of Privacy

Pre-Tech Influences: Jenkins emphasizes that the erosion of clear public-private boundaries began long before the advent of technology and social media. Factors such as advertising, psychological manipulation, and feminist movements played significant roles.

• Quote:
  "Tech comes in, but the border between public and private had already dissolved by the time social media comes in." [36:53]

Tech as an Accelerator: While technology, particularly social media, has accelerated the integration of public and private lives, Jenkins contends that the foundational changes were already underway.

• Quote:
  "Tech is what is blamed for that change, but the change came before tech." [36:45]

Surveillance Society: Drawing parallels with historical events like the Monica Lewinsky scandal and pre-digital surveillance experiments, Jenkins illustrates how the intrusion into private lives has long been a societal issue.

• Quote:
  "Jennifer Ringley... placed a camera on her computer as an experiment. It's a 24-hour camera and it becomes a phenomenal sensation." [32:05]

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9. Conclusion: The Importance of Preserving Privacy

Key Takeaways: Jenkins underscores that privacy is a constructed concept that requires ongoing effort to maintain. She advocates for preserving private spaces as essential for intimacy, trust, and societal well-being.

• Quote:
  "It's good to have privacy. It's not hypocritical to be different in public. There are different sides to ourselves." [38:30]

Societal Benefits: Maintaining a balance between public and private realms benefits both individuals and society, fostering better citizenship and healthier personal relationships.

• Quote:
  "Citizens need that to be better in public. We need it for intimacy." [38:30]

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Final Thoughts

Tiffany Jenkins provides a comprehensive exploration of how the boundaries between public and private life have been shaped and reshaped across different historical periods. Her analysis challenges modern perceptions of privacy, encouraging listeners to recognize its value and the efforts required to sustain it in an increasingly interconnected world.

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Produced by Jack Bateman.

Transcript

[Tiffany Jenkins]

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[Lauren Good]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. What's the difference between private and public life? And where should we draw the line between the two? Over the centuries, these boundaries have often been blurred, as Tiffany Jenkins explores in her book Strangers and Intimates. In this episode, she speaks to Lauren Goode about everything from the rigid separation of the public and private spheres in ancient Athens to the privacy busting spectacle of Big Brother. Lauren began by asking Tiffany to give an overview of what she explores in the book.

[Tiffany Jenkins]

I was always very interested in privacy and secrecy. I thought both were important and I was very struck with the contemporary discussions about privacy. They're often very tech focused. Many books in the last decade talking about social media, but I thought privacy would obviously have a longer history. It didn't just come from nowhere. It's not a natural thing. Additionally, a lot of other books 19th century Focus Talk about the valuation of privacy in America, in Britain, with a very famous article called the Right to Privacy. But my question with that was, well, how did privacy come to be so valued that we could have kind of panics about it in the 19th century? So I knew I had to look back. I was very, very surprised to find that it's not so much rooted as we might assume in domestic furnishings, in corridors and curtains, or in property laws, both of which are important and do kind of have a kind of a historical moment really in the 18th century, particularly corridors, where they become part of houses. But no, I was interested in when did people begin to set themselves apart both from authority, whether it's a king or the church or the community for each other. And this is something that I found people stumbled upon almost accidentally. It was almost like an accidental thing that privacy was born.

[Lauren Good]

I'd like to start this exploration in 5th century Athens, which shows it gives a really physical display here between the public and the private that would perhaps shock a modern audience. Could you please explain how these two things are actually separate?

[Tiffany Jenkins]

Well, unlike today, where we have a really a blurred border between what is considered public and open to view and what is private, which is hidden or domestic, in ancient Athens, it was sharply delineated, the public realm, where, you know, if you think of things that, if you think about ancient Athens, you've got the Acropolis on top of the hill. They had a venerated public realm, but it was one in which only the male free citizens could participate. Women and slaves were not part of that public realm. Women were chaperoned, went out, and they were very much part of the private realm. The private realm was important. It's where, you know, people reproduced, had relationships, worshiped their gods, but it was not considered civilized, really. It was animal. All the animal things part of life were relegated to it. So it was very much the case that the public realm was venerated, the private realm was denigrated. The public realm very much relied upon the private realm to exist. So women and slaves did everything for these great male citizens who would go after war and then talk about it in the agora. I don't know if you've heard of a man called Diogenes, but he, 5th century BC, wandered into the agora and if you don't mind me saying this, he masturbated and ate in open. And he also defecated. And this was a kind of transgression of that separation between public and private. Diogenes was basically saying, your venerated public realm is not as great as you might think. And if anything is worth doing, you can do it in public. So I think today we have those sort of modern day Diogenes often putting private things into public, and in a way saying that separation is a problem.

[Lauren Good]

You touched on that added layer here where only men are expected to operate in the public space. And we see this happening hundreds and hundreds of years later. In a part of the book you cover in 1784, when the Duchess of Devonshire publicly campaigns for Charles Fox to become MP in Westminster. The response to this was really Fascinating to me when I read the book. Could we please delve into what actually happened?

[Tiffany Jenkins]

She was a member of the aristocracy, one of the most sort of 200 families that ran Britain at the time. So she was important and influential behind the scenes. However, although she was very political and that was fine, it became not fine when she went into the public realm. In a way. She campaigned publicly, she campaigned in the open, she talked to commoners about what way they might not necessarily vote, but influence other people to vote. And she was a celebrity at the time. The newspapers of the day tore into her and they basically also tore into her husband, saying that he was relinquishing his responsibility of the public realm and allowing his woman to participate in public. And it was depicted almost as a kind of type of marital infidelity. She was transgressing that private realm. And what you had in the 18th century, particularly fueled by some of the ideas out of the Enlightenment, ideas about what was natural. And women were very much seen as being naturally the childrearer's very, very important role because they would raise the next generation of political leaders and have a big impact upon society. But that was where they were, that's where they belonged. And women at that time who would transgress and come out of it, like the Duchess of Devonshire, were often put in their place and told to go back to child rearing, go back to the bedroom, go back to the kitchen and go back to the nursery.

[Lauren Good]

So very much that the private in this double space is the expected state.

[Tiffany Jenkins]

I suppose it's expected, it's important. But men were very much seen to be public. They were public men, they could be educated, they could walk the corridors of power. And I mean, this is still. I mean, it's a very class ridden society. So it is very much the case that we're talking about men with property. Not your average kind of greengrocer, if you like. But yes, men were seen to have the values and the rationale capacity for public life, whereas women were seen to be caregivers. Obviously, women very early on would kind of write against this. Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, three Marys would argue that actually they have both the rational capacity for public life, for civic life, and also they very much put their inability to participate is really due to education. They were not educated. So you had this big drive then to educate women so they could take their part in the public world.

[Lauren Good]

It's clear that this idea of the public and private is so interconnected. You describe it very beautifully. In the book as a dance with one another, which I thought was a brilliant way to describe it. Another point I really want to explore is that you talk about the private lives of public figures becoming key to their reputations. Which seems a very natural idea to us as a modern audience. How did this actually come about?

[Tiffany Jenkins]

I think it's probably a twofold process. One is, and we're looking really at the 20th century, where ideas about authenticity and what it is to be a human being migrate, really from that sort of public self I was talking about towards validating and valuing the private. It's a long process, but it's a diminishing of kind of public activity and public achievements towards the more private. To the extent now that you have a situation where if somebody transgresses in private, that's deemed to be more important, particularly artists. This is a big discussion at the moment, isn't there, about artists that behave badly? I think probably a really interesting turning point was Clinton, President Clinton in the 1990s, where his private life became a public matter. Partly because the Republicans or his political enemies were trying to get him on something. They tried a number of different ways to find out that maybe he was involved in financial irregularities or corruption. And they landed on this relationship with Monica Lewinsky and many other women that then became a subject of huge international interest. And it's a turning point where you have many of his supporters say it doesn't matter. Because what matters is what he does in policy, in government, what does he do to the economy, that sort of thing. His private matters don't matter. But you can see 10 years, 20 years later, that would no longer be the case. It sort of flips, and the private becomes almost seen as more authentic, more real. This real sense that the authentic self is what they are behind closed doors and what they don't show you. And usually it's bad, usually it's naughty.

[Lauren Good]

It's not enough to be good at what you do. You have to also be good in the private realm.

[Tiffany Jenkins]

Yes. And that's when it ends up being restrictive. If you think about what we are like, honestly, in private is that we are not always our best selves. We do treat people badly. There is a kind of informal accountability that we have with each other. But if we don't have that space, if we don't have that space, then we can't be better citizens in public. And I think there's a kind of devaluing of our public achievements. You can see that in a lot of biographies that are Written of great men, Marx or Engels or whoever it might be. There's a tendency now to try and pull them down, pull their achievements down. And we do that by looking at the way they treat their children or their partners.

[Lauren Good]

You mentioned biographies there. Can we talk about the success of Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson? You say it's thought to be the first modern biography and that it supports this idea that a person's life story could be of interest.

[Tiffany Jenkins]

The 18th century sees something phenomenal happen, which is the development really of the public sphere. So that's newspapers, that's books. Books often about love and marriage, whether it's Pamela or Rousseau's Julie. And you have really the imprinting of the values of the public world on the page in the public realm. And I think that kind of gives shape to the private realm and it begins to celebrate it. And obviously at the end of the century you have Jane Austen and all those sort of novels about marriage and love. But Boswell's biography is fascinating because you have this sense of the man being important, the day to day life of this person. There's a lot of discussion in Boswell about sex. There's a lot of discussion about achievements. And you have a real sense that the man and the self is important. Towards the end of that period. You also have people writing their own diaries. It's a big contrast to diaries which were perhaps written by Puritans a century earlier, which were very much about how often they prayed, whether they're praying privately or publicly. It's a list of all the times they prayed. And a century later you have Rousseau's Confessions, which is a kind of a modern autobiography. You have the validation of the private individual and their lives on the page and in the public square. And that validates private life. It becomes much more interesting to people. Whereas previously it just wasn't of interest at all.

[Lauren Good]

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[Tiffany Jenkins]

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[Lauren Good]

Head over to getstarted.TikTok.com tiktokads it must have been quite empowering to realise that even if you were quite ordinary, that your personal life was of value and of interest.

[Tiffany Jenkins]

I think so. It begins by validating your inner thoughts. In a sense, that's what sort of diaries do, even if it's beginning with a relationship that you're having, that one is having with God. And it basically says what you're thinking has kind of significance and it probably develops an idea of the self as twofold. Both the things that you do in public or the work you do, but also your intimate relationships, how you are with your family. And I think you can see in that sense, particularly in the 18th century, this development of a space of. Of romance and intimacy, which must have been a wonderful thing to behold and to experience. It's not that people didn't fall in love before, but you have this sort of. By discussing it publicly, I think it gives it some sort of value. And I think at the same time you do see in England the separation of the household from work, the kind of slight separation within the home of particular rooms for particular purposes. You have all these borders being demarcated and I think it creates a space of intimacy and romance.

[Lauren Good]

The home is a topic in your book that really fascinated me. You've just touched on there these changes in architecture in the early Georgian period. There's a brilliant sentence where you say that curtains were drawn, cushions were plumped and the home began to embody this sense of separation, intimacy. You've talked about the separation of rooms. What other Changes took place at this point to make the home this private realm.

[Tiffany Jenkins]

It's not as private as it would become in the Victorian period. So there is a tremendous kind of burst of social life. And visiting. You mentioned Georgian homes, often the kind of first floor is quite a public space. Curtains would be drawn so people could see, you know, women's satin dresses being twirled around the drawing room. And people were going out a lot more. There's the Vauxhall Pleasure gardens, the British Museum opens its doors, there's theatres. So you have this tremendous sense of public life. So it's not entirely separate from private life, but people are beginning to read in the home. They're also reading in coffee houses, but they're beginning to read in the home. And there is the corridor. It takes a long time for the corridor to become a mainstream thing. They don't really take it to heart into the Victorians, but you do get this sort of separation. And that means separation of servants taking up piss pots. They can go down corridors instead of through main rooms. And I think you have a sense there's also this sense of particular rooms begin to acquire particular functions. And so the architecture mirrors the delineation between public and private. And also it's then discussed in the literature of the day. Robinson Crusoe is obviously about a man on an island, but in the first chapter of his book, home is repeated a number and number of times. And he's also taking pleasure in the quotidian, you know, the tea drinking and breakfasting and things like this. Domesticity doesn't become recognized and valued into the end of that century. But you can see the domestic. There's a kind of process by which it's becoming really important.

[Lauren Good]

I'd like to just go back a little bit, I mean, quite a few hundred years to 1502, because you say that this reference to the private property wasn't actually in the Oxford English Dictionary until then. But surely people did view their homes as a private space before that?

[Tiffany Jenkins]

I'm sure they did. And trying to trace sort of concepts back very modern day concepts is a very hard thing. And you can try and do it through things like property acts and the word private, but they're quite changeable words and they mean slightly different things. So the word private really comes from the Latin to be deprived of public office. That kind of sense of separation between public and private that you saw with the Athenians. I think, however, although there were limits on who could enter property and there were also regulations on things like eavesdropping and regulations around the construction of windows and who could see in and who could see out at a time when there was no electric lighting. So windows were very important. You have clear court records where people are defending their borders. I think there wouldn't have been a sense of individual privacy. It would have been much more, you know, that households would be busy places where people are coming and going. You'd work within the home. So those sort of separations, I think, didn't exist. And I think it was only really with the development of limits on the state that you begin to have a sense of the separation between authority and the person. And that happens gradually through that period.

[Lauren Good]

Can we expand a little bit more on that? How did it develop?

[Tiffany Jenkins]

I make the argument that rather than looking at law and property law, where there is a sense of defending a private space, a better place to look is ideas about freedom of conscience. Because with the development of freedom of conscience by 1680 or so, there's this concept of toleration in law which basically says to deal with religious differences which are bloody and chaotic, the best way to do that is to confine them to a private sphere by basically saying you can follow your God and the way you see fit within relative compared to what before by doing it in private. And that, I think, firmly separates the state and the individual in a way that you hadn't seen before. That's why I say it's sort of accidental, because this isn't something that believers, whether you're Martin Luther or Thomas More or the Puritans set out to do. They don't set out to create a private sphere. But ultimately, by following conscience against the authority of the day, whether it's the Catholic Church or King Henry viii, they end up accidentally creating this private sphere. And from then, with freedom of conscience or liberty of conscience, as it's often referred to in the 18th century, you see the concept of freedom of conscience being applied to personal relationships, which previously, up until that point, had been very much considered the responsibility of the community, the church, or God. So freedom of conscience is this sort of thread that begins in the 16th century, and then by the 18th century, it's being applied to who you might choose to have sex with effectively. So I argue that kind of private life has kind of three components, freedom of conscience and civil liberties, which begins to kind of organize the reach of the political realm and then domestic and sexual mores.

[Lauren Good]

And before this point, the church and the community has such a massive role in what we would deem today as very private. You Talk about, you know, that every aspect of life was intertwined within the community. Could we delve into this a little? What aspects of life would your community have been very involved with that were perhaps shock a modern audience?

[Tiffany Jenkins]

I do talk about the bum courts, the bawdy courts. So this is sort of, sort of 1604 onwards. And they had responsibility and could take people to court for all sorts of bad behavior, whether it's singing and dancing on the Sabbath, but also adultery. I mean, it was not possible, it was illegal to commit adultery, but also at times premarital sex, even if you're engaged. What's interesting about it is that the community really were responsible for bringing this to people's attention. And in fact, if you didn't, you could, I think, be accused of bawdy, which is effectively encouraging lavishness and poor behavior. So, you know, there's a number of cases where people are taken to court where they have to explain why they were in private for 15 minutes or so. The witnesses who are called are very forthcoming about what they've seen and they talk about doing it through peepholes. So they obviously every door lives very closely together. These are close knit communities. But the witnesses will talk about, well, I could see through the keyhole or the crack in the door or the gap in the window that they were having relations. They have to go and find other witnesses. And they talk about how I went to find Joan the shoemaker and she came and had a look and could also see that this couple were having intimate relations. Now, the trial was inquisitorial and the sentencing was what could seem to be quite tame, a fine or parading in the street with a sheet on, parading in the public area of the market. But this was very, very serious. Public shame was effective. It could ruin people's reputation. And so people would kind of fall over themselves to find ways not to be publicly shamed. But it did work.

[Lauren Good]

One example that you give is this account of a man from Banbury and he pays three pounds for this crime of fornication rather than making this open display of repentance in front of the community. It's really interesting because I covered this idea in another podcast with Blessing Adams. There's always this idea of a third party weighing in and offering opinion, isn't there?

[Tiffany Jenkins]

Very much so, yes. I mean, I think the thing is about it is that this was a communal society. And so say, for example, a woman had child out of wedlock, the community would have to take care of them. They wouldn't move away Go to the big city, the woman wouldn't be able to do that. You lived and died together, and so you were much more responsible for each other. And I think for cases, even something like wife beating, which would have had a. There aren't the laws against it that there are today. And this is very much the sense today that what happens in private can be very dangerous. And that's true. But I think people knew each other's business and were responsible for each other. So there was less freedom, but perhaps more protection.

[Lauren Good]

It's an interesting thought. And obviously, you know, the church played a massive role and you've talked a little bit about there about how, you know, if women were to have a child out of wedlock, it was very much frowned upon, but also they were part of the community. There does seem to be an added amount of pressure on women here to behave within the confines of this expectation at the time.

[Tiffany Jenkins]

Without a doubt, Laura Gowering writes about how their bodies were effectively public property because their breasts would be felt to see if they were pregnant or not. Their bellies could be felt because they were the mother or the potential mother. Their lives would be increasingly surveilled. And also, of course, so when there begins to be a kind of degree of freedom opening up in the 18th century, and it is the first sexual revolution, but women still find that they are subject to what Mary Robinson called the double standard. Certainly they're much more free compared to what went before, but certainly they are still regulated and they don't have the same freedom that men do.

[Lauren Good]

It seems so shocking, doesn't it, this idea of people peeping through your keyhole and feeling women's breasts to check they're pregnant. I mean, it's so alien, isn't it?

[Tiffany Jenkins]

Yes. And I think the thing that we find difficult, and this is the nature of kind of looking back on different periods, is that privacy was frowned upon. Certainly, you know, it was for adulterers and murderers, as According to one 17th century preacher, it was seen as suspicious. Even the kind of attempt to acquire privacy with another person, it was seen as suspicious whether it was you could be plotting as well as fornicating. And both these things were frowned upon. It only becomes something that is celebrated. I think in the Victorian period, it takes a couple of centuries before privacy is seen as a kind of national value. In England and in America, there's almost.

[Lauren Good]

A lack of trust. I suppose that if people are left to the private space, they can't be trusted to behave.

[Tiffany Jenkins]

I think that's right. And you can see, you know, Martin Luther writes about this. He says, don't give into solitude to a friend of his. Don't be alone, because that's when the devil comes. So there's people's own individual distrust of themselves. What they might do if they are on their own or in private. And of course, yes, other people on their own getting together, they can only be up to no good. Surveillance, I think, was a positive almost it meant that you were safe.

[Lauren Good]

And I'd love to talk about. We've talked a lot about these two very different realms of the public and the private. But there is a space in between. And you mentioned the opening of coffee houses reeking of tobacco with straw at people's feet. Now this is a place where people share their private ideas, but in an open space. Now this is something that we're more familiar with today. What did the opening of establishments like this do to private life?

[Tiffany Jenkins]

I think they helped demarcate begins with mercantile society. So particularly in London, the coffee houses grow up around places where you can find out what's happening at sea or at war. It's at the time of the Enlightenment and there is a lot of discussion about longitude and latitude. It sounds like a very, very exciting time where sort of men got together, they didn't necessarily know each other. They're merchants from far and wide. And they begin to not only talk about longitude and latitude or money, but also politics. This is after the religious wars and politics is beginning to form. So there's a public sense of what it is to be in public. They're private men, but they're very much public matters that are being discussed. And so as a public realm is given kind of shape, you get the use of the word public in new ways. There's a sense of the public has authority. The public is a concept. It's really the middle classes, but nonetheless there's this thing of kind of openness and accountability that comes with the public's gaze. They're considered to be the authority, whether it's in theater criticism as well as political life. And as that happens, you also have the physical demarcation of the private realm with the curtains and the corridors and all the rest of it and the particular rooms. You have its validation through the novels, but also newspapers and periodicals like the Spectator, which was co edited by Joseph Addison. This is an individual who walked around town and talked about it in the pages of the periodical. And that begins to be read at home on the breakfast tables and all the rest of it. And so you Mentioned. I talk about the public and private like a dance. What you have here is the kind of two figures of public and private becoming much clearer. They separate slightly, although they're still in connected. And I think the most important thing about it is that they each give each other form. So you can't really have a private realm clearly delineated without a public realm. You need two to kind of contrast and they each have slightly different roles. What you have in the 18th century that you didn't have in ancient Athens is both become equally validated. In fact, it almost becomes the case at the end of the 1800s that the private rises higher in esteem than the public. But you have the two kind of really complementing each other. Now.

[Lauren Good]

We've talked a lot about history, we've talked about Athens and the Georgian period. And you know, it's very much a changing relationship, as you've just touched on there, between the public and the private. But there's also a modern spin. In this book we're dealing with now, a time where the two have become a lot more intertwined with the rise of tech and social media. What's your opinion regarding the role of tech and how it's actually played a part in our private lives?

[Tiffany Jenkins]

I think it's greatly overstated and in fact there are far more important influences. So if you look at the early 20th century, there are three developments that I think are really important. One is the beginning of polling and kind of scientific interest in the inner lives of the public. And I'm talking here and really at. I concentrate both on Britain and America. That happens in advertising. They're much more interested in what do people think, so they can sell their hidden desires back to them. People like Ernest Dichter or Edward Bernays, who works for Woodrow Wilson and talks about manufacturing consent. The kind of psychological theories that are fashionable at that time seep into politics, to commerce, to and to social science. And a lot of social scientists and politicians and advertisers delve into the inner recesses of people's psychology to persuade them. You hear echoes of that today with the notions of nudge and also with tech. It's like maybe where the algorithm is correct, we can kind of push them towards doing one thing or the other, choosing this political party over the other. But that concept begins pre tech. And at the same time you do have you see developments in people's behavior. My argument is that the self isn't this kind of consistent thing. It changes. People are different in different periods. Not like they're kind of molded from clay, from above, with no agency. But there's a much more kind of they do respond to the environment they operate in and live in. So David Reisman is an American social scientist in the 1950s. He talks about changing character from individuals who are more tradition focused and they have a kind of internal gyroscope. They have more of an inner life to ones that much more orientated towards their peers and much more open, much more kind of open about who they are behaving ways that perhaps we would see as familiar today. He puts this down to changes in tradition, changes in workplace. So the character of the time was much more kind of the salesman that you see in Mad Men. They needed to get on with each other, much less orientated towards old ways of doing things. Then the third thing that I think happens, and this is all pre the social media and tech world, is that the private realm is opened up by political actors. This is primarily those on the left and also particularly radical feminists, people like Cara Hanish, who coined this wonderful phrase, the personal is political. And it's effectively saying that the old ways of trying to change the world haven't worked and we need to be much more open towards going into the private realm. So that might be changing language or looking at the way children are raised. And this, if we do this effectively, this may change the inequalities that we see, particularly between men and women. So all those three things happen. The kind of intrusion into the private from scientists and authorities, I should mention somebody like Kinsey, who does that. The Kinsey reports. Big thing happening there in the 50s with sex going into the public realm through sort of social science. And that's not distrusted in the same way as governments. So there are privacy concerns when governments ask people questions, but not social scientists. So you have these three things. You have the intrusion into the private realm from advertisers and governments and social scientists. You have the change in the character to being more authentic and open, being much more open about feelings in the public realm. And then you have the intervention to the private from left and feminists, and then the right get into it as well. And all that happens before Mark Zuckerberg is, I think, is it before he's born or certainly before he's opening Facebook and all the rest of it. Tech then comes in and kind of accelerates it. But if we think of things that reality television, that happened in the 1970s, Candid Camera in the 1950s, Big Brother, that was a TV production, it wasn't social media. And I think those things were actually far more important than we consider today. And I think there's a real danger then that discussions around privacy just become technology. And technology is blamed for everything these days. It's an easy blame, but actually history shows us there are all sorts of tech panics. And although tech is important, it doesn't exist in a vacuum.

[Lauren Good]

So you're actually saying in your opinion, that this change came before tech and tech is what is blamed for that change.

[Tiffany Jenkins]

That's right. So tech comes in, but the border between public and private had already dissolved by the time social media comes in. So one of the first things that you see the Internet used for is there's a very interesting experiment that happened in sort of the 1990s. This is at the height of the Monica Lewinsky and Clinton scandal, around the same time as the Truman show, which is amazing film where he basically lives inside a TV studio and his life is perfect. And he finally realizes it's all constructed and he tries to break out of it. These are commentary on the kind of surveillance society of the time. 1996, there's a woman called Jennifer Ringley, and she is a computer studies major at university in the States. And she places a camera on her computer as an experiment. It's a 24 hour camera and it becomes a phenomenal sensation. And as does she. You know, she's sleeping, drinking, going to college, the usual kind of stuff that we're used to now in terms of 24 hour cameras on everybody. But she becomes a sensation. But she wasn't the first. I mean, she was the first in terms of Internet and technology. But she's happening at the same time as all these other kind of portrayals of the private in public and the invasions of privacy that are going on by individuals themselves. Tech just accelerates it.

[Lauren Good]

We've talked about so much here, from 5th century Athens to the modern world. I mean, there's so much to absorb. For people reading the book, what message would you like them to take?

[Tiffany Jenkins]

I think the first thing is that privacy is not natural. It's something that you have to define and fight for that. It's bigger than just digital privacy. It's about what we show each other in public and what we keep to ourselves in private. It's about what's subject to regulation and authority and what's free to be kept for ourselves. And I think it's really important that today when we see the differences between public and private as negligible or not important, that begin to think that actually maybe it is important to try and set ourselves apart, that we all need this kind of backstage to be bad or to work things out. We need it for intimacy. You know, the first thing that happens in any relationship when you begin to trust each other is that you tell them something private. And that creates this sort of realm of trust. And I think citizens need that to be better in public. And it's good to have. It's not hypocritical to be different in public. There are different sides to ourselves. And having a public self as well as a private self benefits not just the individual, but society.

[Lauren Good]

That was Tiffany Jenkins, a writer, cultural historian and broadcaster speaking to Lauren Good. Tiffany's book is Strangers and the Rise and Fall of Public Life. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.