Table of Contents
Is Your Right to Privacy Just a Modern Myth?
Explore the surprising history of privacy in Strangers and Intimates. Discover why our need for a private life is not a natural right but a recent, evolving invention and what that means in our digital world.
Intrigued by the idea that your sense of privacy was shaped by centuries of religious revolt, political scandal, and social change? Continue reading to uncover the fascinating journey of how private life was invented, lost, and reinvented.
Genres
Psychology, History, Society & Culture
A fascinating history of privacy.
Strangers and Intimates (2025) traces the evolution of private life from ancient Athens through the Victorian era to our digital present, arguing that privacy is a historical construct rather than a natural right. It examines key transformations including Luther’s development of individual conscience, the Victorian cult of domesticity, and the 1970s feminist movement’s politicization of personal experience.
When Harry and Meghan stepped away from royal duties in 2020, citing a desire for privacy, many were puzzled by their subsequent tell-all interviews and memoirs. Were they being hypocritical?
Actually, their story reveals something fascinating about how we think about public and private life today. The truth is, having a “private life” isn’t natural or universal – it’s a historical invention. In ancient Athens, life was divided between the polis, the public sphere of politics and citizenship, and the oikos, the household realm. Meanwhile, medieval Europeans viewed privacy with suspicion, often conflating it with dangerous secrecy.
These days, we’re caught in a strange tension: we demand transparency and authenticity, yet we also fiercely protect our privacy. Social media pushes us to perform for an audience, while digital surveillance quietly chips away at our personal boundaries. Looking at how past generations wrestled with similar questions can give us perspective – and maybe even help us chart a better path forward.
The beginnings of privacy
It’s January 1521, in the ancient city of Worms on the Rhine. The air is thick with anticipation as nobles, bishops, and princes gather for one of history’s most consequential meetings. This is the Diet of Worms – not a medieval health regimen, but an assembly of the Holy Roman Empire, where the most powerful figures in Europe convene to address matters of state and faith.
Standing somewhat apart from this magnificent assembly is a figure who would reshape the Western world: Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk turned reluctant revolutionary. Just four years earlier, Luther had nailed his famous 95 Theses to the castle church door in Wittenberg, challenging the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences – those spiritual “get out of jail free” cards that supposedly reduced time in purgatory. His arguments struck at the heart of church authority. And he’d gone further still, calling Pope Leo X the Antichrist himself.
Now Luther faces Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor – a political ruler distinct from the Pope’s spiritual authority – who demands he recant his writings. In this moment, Luther makes a declaration that would echo through centuries: “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.” He refuses to act against his conscience, insisting that Scripture alone, not church hierarchy, holds ultimate authority.
To understand the revolutionary nature of this moment, consider how medieval life operated. Church bells marked the hours, religious festivals organized the calendar, and every aspect of daily existence moved to the rhythm of collective Catholic worship. Faith was communal: you encountered God through priests, sacraments, and the institutional church.
Luther shattered this model. By declaring conscience sovereign and Scripture accessible to all believers, he introduced something radical: a private, individual connection with God. This wasn’t just theological reform. It was the birth of modern interiority. When Luther spoke of conscience, he carved out a space within the self that was beyond external authority – a sanctuary where the individual could encounter truth directly.
This Protestant emphasis on personal faith and individual conscience helped shape European conceptions of private life, championing the idea that each person possesses an inner realm worth protection and respect.
Public and private spheres
The eighteenth-century writer Joseph Addison loved nothing more than wandering through London’s Royal Exchange, watching the world’s merchants conduct their business. As he put it, he was “like the old Philosopher, who upon being asked what Countryman he was, replied that he was a Citizen of the World.” Here was public life at its most dynamic – cosmopolitan, energetic, and essential to anyone who wanted to matter.
At the time Addison was writing, London sat at the center of dramatic changes: the Scientific Revolution, expanding global trade, the beginnings of industrialization, and the Enlightenment’s celebration of reason and progress. Public life had never been more dynamic or essential.
Coffee houses buzzed with political debate, the British Museum opened its doors to curious minds, and the Royal Society gathered to discuss groundbreaking discoveries. Public pleasure gardens like Vauxhall became spaces where social mixing could occur under carefully orchestrated rules. To matter in this world, you had to participate in these public forums – information and its exchange were the currency of influence.
But as public life became more vibrant, private life didn’t disappear. It became more clearly defined and fiercely protected. The household was no longer the center of economic production as it had been in agricultural times. Men increasingly left home for work, creating physical and psychological distance between public and private spheres. New architectural designs featured separate servants’ quarters, while innovations like bell pulls meant domestic staff could be summoned from their own spaces rather than sleeping alongside their employers. Legal frameworks increasingly protected private property as sacrosanct, and domestic spaces became refuges from the bustling public world outside.
Of course, these developments weren’t equally available to everyone. The emerging private sphere was largely the privilege of the growing middle class, while gender, race, and class determined who could fully participate in either public or private life. Women found themselves increasingly confined to domestic spaces, while working-class families had little access to the luxury of privacy that wealthier households enjoyed.
A right to privacy?
In seventeenth-century Europe, privacy was dangerous. French law actually criminalized private meetings of more than four people, viewing them as potential hotbeds of sedition. Having secrets meant you were probably plotting against the state. Fast-forward to the nineteenth century, and we encounter a completely different attitude through what became known as the “Mazzini Affair.”
Giuseppe Mazzini might be largely forgotten today, but in the 1840s he was a household name across Britain. This Italian revolutionary had fled to London, where he moved in progressive circles, campaigning against child labor and advocating for workers’ rights across Europe. His correspondence network encompassed revolutionaries throughout the continent, all united in their belief that ordinary people deserved political representation.
One morning in 1844, Mazzini noticed something odd about a letter he’d received. A postage stamp had been placed directly over another stamp – a telltale sign of tampering. Suspicious, he began asking friends to include tiny items in their correspondence: a hair, a poppy seed, a small flower. These tokens never made it through the English postal system.
What Mazzini had discovered was a systematic surveillance operation. The Austrian ambassador, Philip von Neumann, had quietly asked Home Secretary James Graham to intercept Mazzini’s mail, hoping to gather intelligence on revolutionary activities. When this became public, it sparked what we’d now call a “media firestorm.” Even Charles Dickens got involved. Outraged by the government’s actions, he sarcastically wrote around the seal of his letters: “It is particularly requested that if Sir James Graham should open this, he will not trouble himself to seal it again.”
This outrage reflected a profound shift in how people thought about correspondence. The evolution of the British postal system – particularly the introduction of private mailboxes – had created an expectation that letters would be received and read in domestic spaces without interference. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary had treated privacy and secrecy as interchangeable concepts. But by the 1840s, privacy had lost its negative connotations. It implied solitude and personal space.
The Mazzini Affair marked a turning point. The private sphere became sacrosanct, and the British Post Office largely stopped monitoring correspondence until World War I. Ironically, though, Mazzini wrote his letters in code for the rest of his life.
Home and hearth
The Victorian era witnessed the full flowering of what historians call the “cult of domesticity” – the belief that the family home was a sacred refuge from the industrial world’s harsh realities. This ideology wasn’t just abstract theory; it was lived experience, as a curious episode from 1847 demonstrates.
That year, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were mortified to discover that their private family etchings had been leaked to the press. These intimate sketches showed the royal couple in domestic scenes with their children: Victoria reading to young Princess Victoria, Albert sketching in the garden. A journalist named Jasper Tomsett Judge had acquired unauthorized prints and planned to exhibit them publicly. The royals immediately sought an injunction.
This episode reveals how the Victorian era had transformed the domestic sphere into something almost sacred. The home became an idealized symbol of purity, comfort, and refuge from the dirty world of business and politics. The family hearth represented comfort, coziness, and good cheer – a haven in a heartless world. The ideology of separate spheres claimed that women should avoid the public sphere entirely, focusing instead on the domestic realm of childcare, housekeeping, and religion.
The Victorian conception of privacy as a kind of domestic sanctuary shaped thinking for generations. Decades later, Virginia Woolf built on that idea – but also pushed back against it. In A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929, she famously wrote that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” For Woolf, privacy wasn’t just about having a quiet space; it was about having financial independence and the freedom to think and create. While Victorian ideals often kept women confined to the home, Woolf reimagined privacy as a path to liberation.
The journey from Queen Victoria’s leaked etchings to Woolf’s manifesto reflects a major shift in how privacy was understood. Victorian privacy protected the family from public scrutiny; Woolf’s privacy protected the individual from family obligations. Both recognized that without space for an inner life, true self-expression is impossible. But they saw privacy serving very different purposes, and protecting very different people.
The personal meets the political
On a March evening in 1969, Washington Square Methodist Church in Greenwich Village filled with 300 women and a handful of men. One by one, 12 women stood up and shared something deeply personal: their experiences with illegal abortions. At a time when the procedure was banned except in extreme circumstances, these women had risked dangerous illegal procedures as their only option. Meanwhile, they’d been completely excluded from legislative decisions about their own bodies. Just a month earlier, 15 people had voted against legalizing abortion in New York State – 14 men and one nun.
This Greenwich Village speak-out exemplified the revolutionary credo of the age: the personal is political. This movement had been brewing throughout the ’60s, drawing from diverse intellectual currents that challenged traditional boundaries between personal and political experience. Second-wave feminists like Betty Friedan were identifying how individual women’s domestic frustrations reflected broader social structures, while radical psychiatrists like R.D. Laing argued that personal psychological distress often mirrored social dysfunction. Across disciplines, from psychology to sociology to political theory, a new idea was gaining ground: personal experience wasn’t just private – it was a way to understand and challenge systemic oppression.
Kate Millett took this thinking further in Sexual Politics, which was published in 1970. Millett argued that “politics” wasn’t just about elections and parties – it described “any situation in which one group of people has power over another.” She demonstrated how patriarchal power operated through “the socialisation of both sexes to basic patriarchal polities with regard to temperament, role, and status.”
As the private sphere became politicized, private life opened to unprecedented political scrutiny. Suddenly, everything was fair game: the language you used, the media you consumed, the relationships you formed. Your sexual orientation, your family structure, your personal habits – they all became part of your overarching political identity.
This transformation fundamentally changed how we think about public and private life. The old Victorian boundaries, where “private” meant sacred and protected, gave way to a new understanding where private experience became a source of political authority. Personal testimony became a form of evidence. Individual suffering became grounds for collective action. The personal didn’t just become political. It became the very foundation of political legitimacy in ways that continue to shape our world today.
The end of privacy?
The history of privacy has led us to a strange paradox: we used to fight to protect our private lives, but today, we’re watching the very idea of privacy fade away – and often, we’re the ones helping it disappear.
The transformation began in Silicon Valley, where the rebels who once championed personal computers as tools of individual liberation eventually built what scholars now call “digital panopticons” – surveillance systems that would make Victorian postal inspectors blush. The tech entrepreneurs who styled themselves as antiestablishment nonconformists created platforms that track our every click, purchase, and preference, turning our private behaviors into public commodities.
We embraced this shift with surprising enthusiasm. In 1996, Jennifer Ringley installed a webcam in her college dorm room and began broadcasting her daily life to the world through JenniCam – a pioneering glimpse into the age of voluntary self-exposure that social media would soon make mainstream. Reality television exploded in the 1990s, turning private family dysfunction into public entertainment. Even the last bastions of institutional privacy crumbled when Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky became fodder for round-the-clock news coverage, demonstrating how thoroughly the boundaries between private behavior and public scrutiny had collapsed.
Today, big data harvests our digital footprints to create detailed profiles of our private preferences, habits, and relationships. We carry tracking devices in our pockets, install listening devices in our homes, and document our most intimate moments for public consumption. The Victorian notion of privacy as a sacred domestic sphere protected from public intrusion seems quaint compared to our current reality of voluntary transparency.
But new questions are popping up. As AI gets smarter and surveillance more widespread, we’re starting to wonder if privacy isn’t just about personal dignity anymore – maybe it’s essential for our very ability to thrive as humans. And after centuries of shifting ideas about what’s private and what’s public, we’re now asking: What does privacy even mean today?
How we answer that could shape the kind of society we build.
Conclusion
The main takeaway of this summary to Strangers and Intimates by Tiffany Jenkins is that the concept of privacy isn’t natural or universal. Instead, it’s a historical invention that has evolved dramatically over centuries – from ancient Athens’s division between public polis and private oikos, through Luther’s revolutionary notion of individual conscience, to the Victorian era’s sacred domestic sphere.
The twentieth century saw a fundamental shift where the personal became political, transforming private experience into a source of political authority and opening previously protected intimate spaces to public scrutiny. And today’s digital age presents a new paradox where we voluntarily surrender our privacy through social media and surveillance technologies.