Introduction: The Politics of Family Secrecy

Every family has a secret; most have many. This has also been the case in the past. However, what families conceal and how society views the practices of secrecy, have changed over time and across different cultural contexts. This special issue takes secrecy practices as a lens through which to examine the emotionally charged micropolitics of the family and its intertwinements with macropolitical currents, institutional practices, economic patterns, and wider social norms. ¹

Histories of family secrecy are often emotionally and politically ambivalent; they involve fear, shame, pain, and repression, but they also often include solicitude, tenderness, and degrees of tolerance. Secrets do many things to families: They tie them together in bonds of trust, they weigh on them as unbearable burdens, and they tear them apart, leaving behind hurt feelings and unanswered questions. Engaging in practices of secrecy, families guard their own reputation, hiding from public view that which is unseemly, inappropriate, illicit, or even illegal. Such concealment is sometimes at the expense of one or more family members: the queer brother, the distressed mother, the victim of incest or family violence who is pressured to keep actions or inclinations under wraps for the sake of the family's self-image or status. Yet, as historian Deborah Cohen has pointed out, the protection that secrecy affords can in some cases also benefit the family member who has been victimized, or who has violated oppressive social codes. Secrets can help to forge a social space in which humans can interact in ways that are otherwise frowned upon in their social surroundings. ² Indeed, the cases in which full disclosure of compromising information is unequivocally the best option for the most vulnerable individual may be relatively few.

Family secrecy is entangled with the production of wider social norms and with official policies and practices. Ambivalence can cloak not only a singular family, but also the ways in which families’ knowledge management variably reinforces or undermines the proscriptions and prescriptions of the social world within which they unfold. “Silence and secrecy,” as philosopher Michel Foucault wrote, “are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions; but they also loosen its hold and provide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance.” ³ Keeping secrets is often a curious way for families to simultaneously abide by and disrupt the written or unwritten rules that society sets up for individual and collective behavior.

With the purpose of examining these intricate power dynamics of family secrecy and the shifting social attitudes toward secrecy and disclosure in a variety of geographical contexts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an online international workshop entitled “The Politics of Family Secrecy” was held at the University of Copenhagen in January 2021, organized by the research group behind a collective project with the same name. ⁴ This special issue contains five of the ten thought-provoking papers that were presented and discussed in that forum. Together, they examine new aspects of family history and its political contingencies. This brief introduction outlines discussions of the key concepts of secrecy and family, and outlines some of the main themes, questions, and problems related to the historical study of family secrets in dialog with existing literature on the subject.

What is Secrecy?

In one sense, secrecy is a relatively easily definable practice that has to do with the silencing and covering up of facts, whether they be true or not. As philosopher Sissela Bok notes, “anything can be secret so long as it is kept intentionally hidden, set apart in the mind of its keeper as requiring concealment.” ⁵ A clear and tangible definition such as this, which delineates secrets as pieces of information that are deliberately hushed, is useful for analytical purposes, especially when grave and potentially costly norm violations are at stake. Information about a child conceived out of wedlock, sexual abuse, drug addiction, or a suicide may for example be carefully and consciously kept secret from people outside the family—and even from some of its own members—to sustain an impression of respectability and propriety.

Yet, as Sissela Bok would readily agree, it would be a mistake to define secrecy too narrowly, or once and for all. ⁶ Rather, elements of secrecy are interwoven with all forms of everyday exchange. Although interaction between human beings is predicated on some level of mutual knowledge, that same interaction invariably also involves obscurity, uncertainty, and not-knowing. As sociologist Georg Simmel noted in his famous essay on secrecy and secret societies from 1906: “In all relationships of a personally differentiated sort there develop… intensity and shading in the degree in which each unit reveals himself to the other through word and deed.” ⁷ Simmel argued that humans continually manage their appearance, both consciously and unconsciously, even though they are hardly in full control of how they are perceived. Various forms of secrecy, he would claim, are a fundamental human impulse.

Taking up the mantle from Simmel, sociologist Erving Goffman introduced a theater analogy into his theory of the presentation of self in everyday life to explain the ways in which humans forming “teams” of “actors” invariably operated with a “front” as well as a “backstage,” presenting one image of reality to the “audience” and another to each other when out of sight and earshot. A team in this model may be a single person, but it is more often a group of two or more individuals who share common interests, e.g., a sports team, a gang of workers, or a family. Any individual is bound to be part of several teams, and he or she is perpetually engaged in the management of knowledge vis-à-vis those who are on the outside. ⁸ Following this line of thinking, secrecy is a pervasive and distributed social form that goes well beyond the conscious concealment of extraordinary or particularly compromising pieces of information. It entails situated embodied practices, both consciously and unconsciously performed, and various types of subtle tweaking, adaptation, and negotiation of the immoral, the indecorous, or the liminal. In short, while certain “dark secrets” may be intentionally and painstakingly kept, different shades of secrecy are invariably and often reflexively enmeshed in the everyday life of the individual as well as of the family and its exchanges with surrounding society.

Families Made and Unmade by Secrets

Historically, the family has generally been understood as a community demarcated by consanguinity or affinity (often, though not always, by officially recognized relationships such as marriage or adoption). Most scholars of the family furthermore recognize, along with sociologist David Morgan, that families are continually created and maintained through social practices structured by the prevailing societal ideologies of the family. ⁹ Psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have also theorized the ways in which different knowledge practices—shared jokes, secrets, memories, and myths—contribute substantially to feelings of relatedness and to the formation and modification of families over time. ¹⁰ Family secrets, as sociologist Carol Smart has noted, are not just passive things that must be covered up. Rather, the secret “has to be worked on and practised and geared to a particular goal or set of goals.” Secrets, she continues, can either “make” or “undo” families. ¹¹ In her contribution to this special issue, sociologist Ashley Barnwell further develops this line of thought. Homing in on the role of the “aunt” and theorizing her hidden labor of managing and transmitting information that is often compromising as “shadow work,” Barnwell argues that such transverse secret-keeping and communication are pivotal in creating a continuity of family lore and cohesion.

Collusion and unification around maintaining a presentable front can be a powerful adhesive force, binding family members together in “tense and tender ties.” ¹² Family secrecy—whether of the ubiquitous mundane kind, or the deeper, darker kind—thus serves important social functions. It helps us straddle the gap between ideal and reality, between what was expected of us and what we were able to do, or did. As historian John Gillis has pointed out, there is often a marked disconnect between “the families we live by” (the mythic, imagined, harmonious family) and “the families we live with” (our actual families). ¹³ Over the past couple of centuries, as the family of the Global North has lost many of its practical and economic raisons d’être, the institution has simultaneously become idealized as a safe space emotionally, as a set of mutually supportive relationships characterized by warmth, care, and intimacy. Love has not only conquered marriage, as historian Stephanie Coontz has aptly phrased it; it now envelops the entire family, at least as an ideal. ¹⁴ But real-life families are often unhappy, conflict-ridden, even unsafe for some of its members. Secrets, as Smart puts it, “allow us to create a family story through which actual families come to appear more like the ideal or mythical family.” ¹⁵

Needless to say, secrets are not always shared by all family members; there are “fronts” and “backstages” even within the family, some members are in the know while others are kept ignorant. This tends to create internal lines of division and attachment within the family. While members of the family may be entirely oblivious to the presence of secrets, quite often they sense their existence yet tactically eschew the gray zones of the unsaid. Drawing on Michael Taussig, anthropologist Monica Konrad has pinpointed the power of secrets in the family and emphasized the ways in which family members can deal indirectly with what is concealed: “If secrets can be said to carry certain ‘magical’ properties and may sometimes come to life in the form of the evanescent gift, then knowing what not to know and living one's life in relation to ‘active not-knowing’ are ethico-cultural animations that give fundamental shape and meaning to sociality.” ¹⁶ Practicing such “active not-knowing,” family members may respond to a feeling that something important lurks untold, yet instinctively help to avoid revelation, sensing that it might be unpleasant or damaging to get it out in the open, even within the family.

Such tacit and emotional mechanisms can sometimes help to tighten certain bonds; yet secrets may also cause intense discomfort, repression, and trauma, and ultimately they can even undo families. In many cases, the emotional weight for the individual of having to conceal their preferences, actions, or experiences either because other family members refuse to acknowledge the situation and/or extend their help, or because considerations regarding the social environment and family status require it, can clearly be so oppressive that it leads to alienation. ¹⁷ Insofar as a victim of, for example, family violence, incest, or abuse is pressured to keep silent about their experiences, secrecy can enforce isolation and hence amount to a doubling of the violence.

Being party to a family secret is frequently a source of power. As Simmel has pointed out, the hidden is heightened by fantasy and given a degree of attention that naked reality cannot claim. The power of secrecy, Simmel notes, is “sustained by the consciousness that it might be exploited.” ¹⁸ Insight into the secret of a sister, brother, father, or aunt can be used as bargaining power in intrafamilial relationships; it can also variably sustain feelings of solidarity, hostility, doubt, or guilt. Secrecy thus contributes in complex ways to the inner power dynamics in the family.

Who knows, and who doesn't, furthermore tends to evolve over time and across generations, as secrets are either spilled or buried deeper, becoming either less or more toxic. The damage wrought by secrecy in some cases intensifies over time. In an earlier article, Ashley Barnwell has examined the management of stigma over generations and argued that the negative and unsettling effects of family secrets often increase from one generation to the next, as social codes change and the original rationales behind secrecy become blurred: “Disconnections in meaning and motive between the past and the present leave families to deal with the consequences of stigmatization, and the secrecy that is used to combat or control it, often without any clear way of locating accountability and closure from a discrete cause.” ¹⁹ Adapting and applying Rob Nixon's concept of “slow violence,” Barnwell suggests that such inherited family secrets can perpetuate “the structural inequalities and discriminations of earlier political eras.” ²⁰ Conversely, it seems likely that the significance and negative emotional impact of other secrets dwindle as they recede into a distant past. Such processes presumably also depend on the nature of the secret and who eventually reveals it—and how, and under what circumstances—as well as on whether the secret involved lies of omission, commission, or both.

Nevertheless, as a circumvention of restrictive norms, secrecy also offers “obscure areas of tolerance,” allowing individuals or families to bend the moral boundaries of their time and build a tolerable existence, even if family members may be considered deviant. As two recent works show, societal prohibitions may in fact do more than curtail and delimit; they may shape desires, practices, and experiences in profound ways. In his work on the life of a Republican homosexual couple in twentieth-century Chicago, Robert and John Gregg Allerton, Nicholas L. Syrett shows how the couple in most situations kept the nature of their relationship secret and presented themselves to others as father and son. In 1960, the wealthy and well-connected Robert even adopted his then 60-year-old lover, John, presumably to ensure that he would inherit his wealth as a spouse would have. Interestingly, Syrett shows that the front functioned not merely as a protection for the couple's relationship, but that it also fundamentally affected their way of living so that, in some respects, it actually came to resemble a father–son relationship. ²¹ As historian Rachel Hope Cleves remarks, the portrait “shakes up assumptions about queer coupledom, revealing that the kinship claim of these men was not merely a front, but a meaningful structure for emotional intimacy.” ²²

Secrecy also played an important part in the life of Poul Andræ, one of Denmark's first gay rights activists. In his book about him, historian Karl Peder Pedersen documents how the proscription of Andræ's sexual preferences also nourished his erotic activities and pleasure in a historically specific fashion across late nineteenth-century Denmark, Italy, and the Danish Virgin Islands. By reading classical Greek literature about sex between males, by diligently describing his sexual fantasies in secret diaries, and by seeking little spaces of freedom to live them out, Andræ worked with the taboo, finding that it caused him not only pain, but also immense pleasure. The secrecy itself became part of the erotic gratification, and Andræ's masochistic fantasies often hinged on the possibility of being discovered by the police, so much so that he even encouraged his partners to threaten him with exposure as part of the sexual encounter. ²³ As these examples suggest, secrecy can saturate experience, and can extend the fields of social possibility well beyond mere silencing and sheltering.

Secrecy and Changes of Morality

Because secrecy is a way of dealing with issues that are deemed compromising or even illegal, what we find it necessary to conceal fluctuates with the mutations of morality. Things that seem relatively harmless in many parts of the world today, such as conceiving a child out of wedlock, were potentially explosive a hundred years or more ago. As two articles in this issue illustrate, the question of illegitimate children generated a fraught dynamic of family secrecy in a variety of contexts. Examining Australia in the period 1834–1954, Shurlee Swain shows how illegitimacy gave rise to strategies of abandonment that could maximize a child's chances of survival, yet could also expose the family to public scrutiny. In some cases, women used abandonment to take revenge by baring the identity of the putative father, and to press him for financial support. Focusing on Sweden during the first three decades of the twentieth century, Johanna Sköld & Johanna Sjöberg take stock of the social economy of stigma surrounding babies conceived outside marriage and investigate a fraught market for anonymous births. While unmarried pregnant women were vulnerable to exploitation, they show that these women also sometimes found help to cope economically with their difficult situation.

For most women in Europe, Australasia, and North America, changing social norms as well as easier access to contraception and improved economic possibilities for single mothers have rendered such risky secrecy practices surrounding illegitimate children no longer necessary. Nevertheless, even within the Global North, the individual's possibilities and experiences still differ starkly depending on degrees of financial security, access to healthcare, or other support, as well as the religious values and cultural norms of one's community. Moreover, unmarried mothers around the world clearly still find themselves in socially and economically vulnerable, even desperate situations that engender fraught and painful secrecy practices.

Other practices—such as wife-beating or the corporal punishment of children—which are widely denounced today were considered more acceptable in the past. Hence, such violations are more likely to be carefully concealed by contemporary families than in earlier times. In her recent biography of author Norman Douglas, Rachel Hope Cleves has unraveled a history of pedophilia, documenting that intergenerational sexual encounters were both common and more accepted in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ²⁴ Douglas had numerous sexual relationships with children, and his friends and family knew about them, as did many of his fans and admirers, but few reacted with open disapproval or denunciation. Yet historians have generally refrained from writing about Douglas and the wider tolerance for pedophilia in his time. This is not due to a lack of sources; on the contrary: “There are too many sources that cause discomfort: explicit records of sex acts between Douglas and children; letters from children expressing their affection for Douglas; and endless remarks by Douglas's friends describing him as extraordinary.” ²⁵ Today, pedophilia is more likely to lead to ostracism, and hence to be surrounded by practices of secrecy, than it was one-and-a-half centuries ago. As Cleves points out, the topic is untouchable, unspeakable, a “third rail” of contemporary society. Apparently, this untouchability has spilled into the historiography on sexuality, childhood, and intergenerational relationships. The toleration of pedophilia, too disgusting, too disturbing, or too controversial for historians to probe, has long remained in the shade, making it a kind of secret in its own right. ²⁶

It is not merely the substance of secrets that changes over time, however; secrecy itself has undergone a moral reevaluation. It was not always as condemned as it tends to be in contemporary society. As Deborah Cohen has demonstrated, being able to keep a secret was once considered a virtue. Moreover, the histories of secrecy and privacy are deeply entangled. While today they are, respectively, considered as poisonous and as a hallowed right, a couple of centuries ago “secrecy was privacy's indispensable handmaiden.” ²⁷ People frequently resorted to secrecy to shield the family from undue outside interference, creating and maintaining a private space invisible to the prying eye.

Secrecy in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, as Cohen further points out, was oftentimes a middle- or upper-class prerogative (as is indeed still the case in much of the world today). Working-class living conditions with crowded lodgings, shared stairwells, toilets in the backyard, thin walls, and unfortunately placed windows made it close to impossible to conceal scandalous acts and facts. The rich were better equipped to, and frequently also more invested in, keeping a spotless façade, and this in turn made such a spotless façade a marker of middle- or upper-class identity. Secrecy, in these layers of society, was culturally associated with status, morality, and integrity.

Nowadays, secrecy is often considered morally problematic as well as emotionally painful. For example, when it comes to questions of paternity, there seems to be a general agreement that information about biological origins ought to be transparent. As Carol Smart has noted: “While it was once entirely normative to treat paternity as a matter of pragmatics rather than biological truth, it is now almost impossible to keep secrets about biological paternity; those who seek to do so are increasingly identified as being outside appropriate moral boundaries.” ²⁸ In her contribution to this special issue, historian Bettina Hitzer likewise traces a shift in the culture surrounding adoption in twentieth-century Germany: from secrecy to openness. The formation of identity, Hitzer shows, became ever more thoroughly entwined with ideals of mutual honesty, disclosure, and information about one's biological origins. At the same time, notions of the family changed markedly.

Whereas in earlier ages most might have favored keeping family irregularities private, this trend has thus to some extent been reversed. Various cultural currents have contributed to this change; among these, a broad liberalization of social norms, the neoliberal insistence on individual responsibility, and Freudian theories of buried trauma are all central. In our article in this issue, Marie Meier and I point to a shift in psychoanalytical psychiatrists’ understanding of human interiority and mental illness at a mental institution in mid-twentieth-century Denmark. Whereas the family was consistently seen as a locus of illness, increasingly, over the decades, doctors progressively began to encourage patients to open up and divulge their innermost secrets as a means to mend familial dysfunctionality and heal mental disease. In the past couple of decades, this cultural imperative of disclosure has arguably become further amplified by social media and by DNA testing, as well as by archival laws that secure access to one's own family history. Evidently, this does not necessarily mean that society has in fact become more transparent at an individual, familial, or structural level.

Historical studies of family secrecy remind us of the historicity and situatedness of our own morality. In so doing, they implicitly suggest that in the future some taboos will be lifted and certain kinds of secret-keeping rendered superfluous (even if the secrets of earlier generations may still be kept)—but also that other taboos will emerge in tandem with changing historical circumstances. Just as humans are bound to violate social prohibitions, they are also likely to try to cover up such violations. Regardless of how much secrecy is disparaged, or how much new technologies might help us to expose uncomfortable truths or shameful acts, this dynamic is unlikely to ever disappear.

Ethical and Methodological Challenges

Interrogating family secrecy means inquiring into some of the most intimate arenas in people's lives. It can unravel forgotten suffering and survival strategies, and it can also affect living relatives. The endeavor therefore necessitates considerations about the ethics of our historical research practices, beyond anonymizing individuals past or present. Do we have an obligation to expose or to refrain from exposing particular practices of family secrecy? How can we collect, analyze, and store sensitive information in an ethically sound fashion?

Queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has proposed that researchers must confront the ethico-political dimensions of our scientific practice. While truth, thoroughness, and correctness are unquestionable objectives for our work, we must also ask: What do the narratives we produce do? What does the production and dissemination of this historical knowledge accomplish in the present? To reflect systematically on this, Sedgwick distinguishes analytically between “paranoid” and “reparative” readings. The paranoid follows a “hermeneutics of suspicion” and aims to identify the exploitative, repressive, or marginalizing structures and practices in the field studied. Power is assumed to be always already in play, and the analysis is about charting its operations and effects. The reparative reading, however, homes in on moments of desire, pleasure, and happiness that emerge—possibly only in quick flashes—in historical archives otherwise shaped by oppressive orders. Whereas the paranoid reading might dismantle false consciousness and equip the individual to identify and deal with oppression, the reparative reading points to other ways of being in the world and draws the contours of a different future. ²⁹ Sedgwick argues for a combination of the two reading strategies.

As the articles in this special issue show, histories of family secrecy offer the opportunity for both critical and reparative readings. Families have been repressive and affectionate—banning certain practices, tolerating others. Examining these enable us to document immense suffering, but also incredible survival and moments of joy. Social prohibitions keep in place a specific social order; some protect the vulnerable, others do the opposite. Oftentimes, they do both at the same time. Histories of family secrecy should be attuned to these ambivalent dynamics.

Beyond the ethical challenge, researching family secrets and the cultural attitudes that govern them poses an obvious methodological problem: How do we find out what people sought to cover up, and how they did so? Ultimately, as historians we will have to accept that we will only ever be able to reconstruct parts of the picture. However, the analytical strategy pursued by the authors of this special issue has been to follow the fragments and traces left by meticulous practices of secrecy in a variety of archives and published accounts—including personal diaries and letters, institutional records, and press coverage, as well as qualitative surveys produced today.

In so doing, the authors have sought to connect individual cases and stories to broader historical trends, showing how the substance of secrets—as well as secrecy itself—have shifted along with social, economic, normative, and political developments. They excavate the multivalent dynamics of secrecy, and show that it can be painful and risky as well as necessary and enabling. Indeed, social life might be impossible without it.