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Privacy, autonomy, and birth control in America, 1860-1900
Access to birth control became, controversially, protected by the “right to privacy” in 1965; a hundred years before, “procreation was a matter of public concern.” Yet, contradictorily and confusingly, Victorian women – and their bodies – were protected (and limited) by a powerful social division between private and public spheres.
May 2016 / 6 min.
Justice Scalia on the Constitution, privacy, and criminality
Justice Scalia once noted that “the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.”
April 2016 / 1 min.
Prohibition and the domestic home
The Volstead Act (implementing Prohibition), in keeping with American legal tradition, gave special recognition to the home and the private, domestic sphere.
April 2016 / 2 min.
Franz Neumann on the importance of history to freedom
Freedom, argues Franz Neumann, requires several kinds of knowledge (historical, for example), not simply the absence of state (or private) coercion – though that too is a necessary and critical element.
April 2016 / 5 min.
Eugenic sterilization in California: practicing “good medicine”
Indiana may have passed the first sterilization law in 1907, but before World War II, it was California that led the nation in eugenic sterilizations in an attempt to “apply science to social problems.” Such legislation was part of a wave of Progressive Era public health activism that encompassed pure food, vaccination, and occupational safety.
April 2016 / 5 min.
Surveillance and Sodomy in 1918 Sacramento
A “cleanup” of 1918 Sacramento resulted in an intensified “[p]olice surveillance of boardinghouses, brothels, pubs, and gambling houses” and effectively turned these areas – none of which were traditional domestic homes – into “semipublic” spaces.
April 2016 / 5 min.
Women, public health, and the police power
The early twentieth century saw working men left free from government protection in the name of “liberty of contract”; women, on the other hand, received such protection, but at the cost of second-class status.
April 2016 / 2 min.
Privacy can keep histories of abuse hidden from public view
Privacy can serve both to protect individuals and to shield abusers from public visibility.
February 2016 / 2 min.
Affirmative vs. passive privacy in domestic violence and abortion
A “passive” version of the right to privacy – the “right to be let alone” – creates challenges for advocates against domestic violence. A more “active” version provides a viable alternative.
February 2016 / 2 min.
Haverty v. Bass: protecting the public health in 1876
In 1873 a Bangor police officer and a physician forcibly pulled Martin Haverty’s child “out of the arms of the mother” in order “to remove it to the city hospital” for quarantine due to suspected smallpox infection.
February 2016 / 2 min.