| Document Type
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BL
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| Record Number
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1032759
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| Doc. No
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b787129
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| Main Entry
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Adams, Katherine,1964-
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| Title & Author
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Owning up : : privacy, property, and belonging in U.S. women's life writing /\ Katherine Adams.
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| Publication Statement
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Oxford ;New York :: Oxford University Press,, 2009.
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| Page. NO
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vi, 264 pages :: illustrations ;; 24 cm
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| ISBN
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0195336801
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: 9780195336801
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| Bibliographies/Indexes
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
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| Contents
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Introduction: Imperiled privacy -- Tarnished icons, shining lives : Fuller's publication of privacy -- Stowe's truths : privacy, privation, and the mob -- Freedom and ballgowns : Elizabeth Keckley's executive domesticity -- The cost of self in two Alcott utopias.
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| Abstract
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This book provides a model for interpreting the U.S. discourse on privacy. Focusing on the formative period of the nineteenth century, the author shows that conceptions of privacy became meaningful only when posed in opposition to the encroaching forces of market capitalism and commodification. Even as Americans came to regard privacy as a natural right and to identify it with sacred ideals of democratic freedom, they also learned to think of it as fragile and under threat. She argues that narratives of violation and dispossession played a fundamental role in the emergence of U.S. privacy discourse and in the influence this discourse continues to exert within U.S. culture. Using writing by and about women writers including Sojourner Truth, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Keckley and Louisa May Alcott, the author traces the figure of imperiled privacy across five decades. Where previous studies of early American privacy have focused on white femininity and middle-class domesticity as defining features, this book contends that privacy is an empty category. Without a fixed content of its own, privacy acquires meaning only by being articulated-and constantly re-articulated-against threats of invasion and loss. The author looks at how such narratives operate within particular political and economic contexts, including antebellum reform, racial reconstruction, free labor ideology, and laissez faire social Darwinism. The analysis concludes at the end of the century with calls for legislation to protect the individual's "right to be let alone," a culminating moment in the discourse of threatened privacy that informs the American sense of self to this day.
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| Subject
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Alcott, Louisa May,1832-1888.
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Fuller, Margaret,1810-1850.
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Keckley, Elizabeth,1824-1907.
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Stowe, Harriet Beecher,1811-1896.
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| Subject
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American literature-- Women authors-- History and criticism.
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American literature-- 19th century-- History and criticism.
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American prose literature-- Women authors-- History and criticism.
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Autobiography-- Women authors.
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Privacy in literature.
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Privacy-- Philosophy.
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Privacy-- United States-- History-- 19th century.
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Women authors, American-- Biography-- History and criticism.
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18.06 Anglo-American literature.
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American literature-- Women authors.
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American literature.
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American prose literature-- Women authors.
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Autobiography-- Women authors.
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Privacy in literature.
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Privacy.
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Women authors, American-- Biography.
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United States.
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| Dewey Classification
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810.9/492072
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| LC Classification
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PS366.A88A32 2009
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| NLM classification
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18.06bcl
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