Introduction

I’m Iona Italia, your host this week. My guest today is the historian Tiffany Jenkins, the author of the book Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life. It’s not a long book, but it covers a lot of ground both historically and philosophically. Among other subjects, we talk about the evolution of the notion of a private sphere from the times of Ancient Greece to the Victorian era; about the origin of the idea of freedom of conscience, born out of the necessity of respecting people’s diverse private religious beliefs—a hard-won right only attained after centuries of bloodshed—the role of technology both in securing privacy (as with the gummed envelope) and in violating it (starting with the Kodak camera); the fetishisation of identity; the notion that the personal is political and finally the speech policing of today, when, Tiffany argues, the important boundaries between private and public have largely dissolved. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Tiffany Jenkins.

Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life: Jenkins, Tiffany: 9781529034165: Amazon.com: Books

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Transcript

Iona Italia: Where I’d like to begin is: you start with the idea of how the separate spheres of public and private came to develop. And you give us, in your opening chapters, a detailed summary of how that happened, moving from ancient Rome and ancient Greece through medieval Europe and into the Victorian age. You talk about the contrast between Ancient Greece, in which there was a clear division between public and private, and it was a sexed division. Women were in the home, in the private sphere; men were out in the public sphere, which was considered the realm of importance—meaning, action, the political sphere. And you quote Aristotle on man being a political animal. And then that division between public and private dissolved in the medieval period. Do you want to start by talking us through that history a bit?

Tiffany Jenkins: Yes. So I look at public and private as a lens through which to understand all sorts of developments in human history. There’s always some kind of division—it might just be around toileting or sex. There’s a separation from what other people can see, and from where authority can go.