Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U.S. Women's Life Writing

by Katherine Adams

Overview

Owning Up provides a new model for interpreting the U.S. discourse on privacy. Focusing on the formative period of the nineteenth century, Adams 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. Owning Up 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 biographical and autobiographical writing by and about women writers including Sojourner Truth, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Keckley, and Louisa May Alcott, Adams 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, Owning Up 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. Chapters look 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195336801
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/29/2009
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Katherine Adams is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina.

Table of Contents

AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter Two:Tarnished Icons, Shining Lives: Fuller's Publication of PrivacyChapter Three:Stowe's Truths: Privacy, Privation and the MobChapter Four:Freedom and Ballgowns: Elizabeth Keckley's Executive DomesticityChapter Five:The Cost of Self in Two Alcott UtopiasEpilogueIndex

Editorial Reviews

"Owning Up takes on a significant subject for feminist historians and literary scholars and gives it new life. Katherine Adams has produced an influential new category in determining how 'the rhetoric of privacy' not only affirms, but also challenges, the dominance of democratic authority."-Shirley Samuels, Cornell University

"Adams treats the focus of her subject with insight, nuance, and care. Her close readings and broadly defined theoretical and historical contexts are rewards in themselves." —Biography

"Valuable for its insights into the interplay of privacy-property discourses' politics and socioeconomics, of stalwart white masculinity and sacred white domesticity alike imperiled, Owning Up invites us to contrast persistent "images of embodied black unfreedom" with "the fantasy of white disembodiment" in the US today." —Modern Language Quarterly

"A learned and engaging book that makes a strong contribution to compelling questions of privacy and democracy in the nineteenth-century United States." —The New England Quarterly

"Offers compelling interpretations of a series of undervalued and often overlooked texts in order to reveal how women writers—as much as male writers—contributed to understandings of privacy in nineteenth-century America." —Legacy

From the Publisher