{"id":27935,"date":"2013-01-29T22:18:38","date_gmt":"2013-01-29T22:18:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=27935"},"modified":"2013-01-29T22:22:14","modified_gmt":"2013-01-29T22:22:14","slug":"family-secrets-by-deborah-cohen-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=27935","title":{"rendered":"Family Secrets by Deborah Cohen: review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Family Secrets by Deborah Cohen: review<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Telegraph<\/a>
\n2013-01-29<\/p>\n

Judith Flanders<\/strong><\/p>\n

Judith Flanders delves into Deborah Cohen’s ‘Family Secrets<\/a>‘<\/em><\/p>\n

As former News of the World<\/em> journalist Paul McMullan put it so memorably at the Leveson Inquiry<\/a>, \u201cPrivacy is for paedos\u201d. In part, this was no more than a tabloid journalist using words carelessly. If he had said secrecy, not privacy, was for \u201cpaedos\u201d, the response would surely have been more muted, for post-Freud, secrecy is viewed as something entirely negative, whereas privacy is a right, enshrined in law.<\/p>\n

Historian Deborah Cohen<\/a>, whose previous book investigated how the British lived with their possessions, now explores how they lived with their ideas.<\/p>\n

What did families try to hide, from 18th-century Britons in India, to suburbanites in the 20th century? In the 19th century, it was a truism that families should have no secrets from each other, even as they presented an impenetrable fa\u00e7ade to the world. Family Secrets<\/a><\/em> explores, via dozens of illuminating stories culled from the divorce-courts, adoption agencies and institutes for the mentally impaired, among others, how the world changed into a place where everybody tells everyone everything, from therapists to reality television.<\/p>\n

By the early 19th century, there were 20,000-odd British men in India, mostly unmarried; over half the children baptised in one Calcutta church were both illegitimate and mixed race. Everyone knew about mixed-race relationships in India, but what happened when the men went home? Sometimes the children were brought back by their fathers, their mothers, referred to in legal documents as \u201cold servants\u201d, left behind. Sometimes the children themselves created elaborate back-stories: Anna Leonowens<\/a>, the author of the autobiography<\/a> that became The King and I<\/a><\/em>, fabricated her entire childhood in order to hide her mother\u2019s mixed-race background…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Family Secrets by Deborah Cohen: review The Telegraph 2013-01-29 Judith Flanders Judith Flanders delves into Deborah Cohen’s ‘Family Secrets‘ As former News of the World journalist Paul McMullan put it so memorably at the Leveson Inquiry, \u201cPrivacy is for paedos\u201d. In part, this was no more than a tabloid journalist using words carelessly. If he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,459,8,10],"tags":[8567,13525,13526,7738],"class_list":["post-27935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-media-archive","category-uk","tag-anglo-indians","tag-deborah-cohen","tag-judith-flanders","tag-the-telegraph"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27935\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}