Jill Lepore: evaluation

Transcript context

…You’re writing more and more on the issues of publicity and privacy. Today is the 125th birthday of a woman born under the name Gladys Louise Brooks, known as America’s sweetheart. We all know her as Mary Pickford. How does Mary Pickford fit into your vision of American history? One of the things I find so interesting about our modern discussion of privacy is that the very notion historically comes out of the confinement of women. The big discussion about privacy — that began in the United States and influences our constitutional arguments today — starts in 1890 when Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, living both here in Cambridge together, write an article for the Harvard Law Review called “The Right to Privacy.” What they’re animated by in doing that is, Warren, who’s married into a very influential Washington family, has been concerned about the way new technologies of photography — but this will then apply to film as well — have exposed people’s ordinary lives to public view in a new way. In particular, they have made women visible, and the private lives of families visible. Reporters with photographers come to Warren’s wedding, for instance, and his wife’s father’s funeral is covered in the paper with photographs. So Warren and Brandeis, who write this article called “The Right to Privacy,” in which they argue that there inheres in the Bill of Rights a constitutional right to privacy — which later becomes resurrected, and since 1965, we use it to understand rights to reproductive privacy — is actually really about trying to hide women. So much about Pickford and the early women of cinema and the controversial nature of their careers has to do with women becoming visible, more parts of women’s bodies becoming visible. The 1920s new woman and the flapper and the visibility of women incites a big public conversation that makes possible, eventually, the abolition of the Comstock laws. It’s the first federal law in 1873 that defines pornography, and it includes everything from discussion of contraception to discussion of homosexuality. Those Comstock laws, the federal law and all the little state laws that follow, are really being contested in the 1920s as freedom of speech issues. So I guess I would put Pickford in that context and in that conversation because what I think the legacy interestingly is for, that our notion of the right to privacy historically has its roots in men’s interest in keeping women visible from public view, means that we have a really screwy understanding, constitutionally, of the right to privacy, and that reproductive rights, for instance, are grounded in a right that doesn’t, to me, make a lot of sense. Reproductive rights seems to me would’ve been much better grounded in claims for equal protection or claims for liberty than in claims for privacy, which I think turned out to have kind of backfired as a matter of legal discourse. That’s a long departure from Mary Pickford, but when I look at — to get back to your silo question — when I look at something now, or in the past, it always appears to me on a timeline. Not all historians do this, but I’m really fascinated by timelines, so where did Pickford come from? And what’s Pickford’s legacy? I just sort of put things in that way. Of course, she’s also an immigrant from Canada. But speaking of the visibility of women, Eleanor Roosevelt. You’ve just written a preface to a book by Eleanor Roosevelt, correct?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.