The nineteenth-century preoccupation with shielding the 'nursery and the bedchamber' from the glare of publicity reflected the popular idealization of the family as a shelter from the competitive pressures and corrupting influences of modern industrial life.  Caught up in a decades-long obsession with domesticity, books, pamphlets, periodicals, drawings, lithographs, and public lectures celebrated parenthood, marriage, childhood innocence, and filial duty.  Although these familial obligations were always presented as expressions of the natural order, they apparently did not come to people naturally.  Consequently, scores of manuals dispensed advice on how to be a good mother, father, husband, wife, sister, or brother, and, so as not to neglect those unfortunates who had been inexplicably excluded from the marriage bond, writers such as William Aikman, author of Life at Home (1870), also provided moral instruction to bachelor uncles and maiden aunts. 

According to Aikman, "mere earthly friendships" could not compare with the spiritual fulfillment one could find within the family, the flower of human history, the means for the development of character and the multiplication of happiness, the gift from God that made "bearable the loss of Eden."  It was useless, in Aikmans' view, to talk of the "brotherhood of man" since "sin" or "selfishness, rather, and consequent distance and coldness have become the type of human intercourse."  Happily, however, the man who had been beaten down by the cruelties and disappointments of the world had a refuge,

a place where he comes, sick it, may be, and sad of heart, and where he knows that he shall not be disappointed.  Careworn and weary, he enters his home after a day of bitterness...Here is one who will sympathize; here are more than one who will think well of him and nothing but well; here are eyes which will look lovingly, and voices which will speak tenderly; here are hands that will sooth his aching head, a bosom on which he may lean; here are little ones that will clamber on his knee and tell him that of all in this world he is the dearest and wisest and best. ^16s

For Aikman, as for Warren, Brandeis, and Reade, reticence was essential to the cohesion of family life.  He therefore advised both husbands and wives to remain silent about family matters because the mortification attached to revelation would and should eclipse nearly every other concern.  On one hand, Aikman argued, "For a wife to permit to escape her lips, so that it reaches a third person, a complaint against her husband, to expose his faults or give utterance of her grievances, is to do a foolish and usually a wicked thing."  On the other, "for a husband openly to censure his wife, to speak of her habits or her acts so that others shall think less respectfully of her, is to proclaim his own shame."  Aikman did not feel obliged to explain exactly why the disclosure of family problems was so patently misguided.  He simply asserted, "It is fortunate that the common sense of men holds this in scorn" because "no third person can or ought to come in; to even ask the advice of a third person is to give evidence that the identity of the married life is gone." ^17s

 The irony—a quality that seems to be omnipresent in every discussion of privacy—of Aikman's admonition is that it was given in an advice book.  However, from Aikman's perspective, advising people not to ask for advice was perfectly logical because the calamity to be avoided was public admission.  What seemed most terrible to Aikman and his contemporaries was not family troubles in themselves, but the act of confession or, as Aikman put it, providing 'evidence' of family disunity.  Thus Aikman gave his readers a way to solve their problems discreetly.  By perusing his book for general edification rather than any particular personal reason, they could work out their family issues without ever having to 'proclaim their own shame.'

Works such as Life at Home not only threw up a fence between public and  private activity, they also specified private life as the locus of individual fulfillment.  In placing the domestic circle at the pinnacle of civilization, writers like Aikman reversed the priority of public over private that was basic to the Western political tradition from Plato to Marx.^18s Without setting Aikman on the level of classical political philosophy or pretending to summarize that tradition, it matters that the cult of domesticity embodied in Aikman's writings turned Marx's formulation of the relationship between freedom and necessity on its head.  Marx, who completed the first volume of Capital two years before Life at Home was published, followed mainstream political thought in locating the family within the realm of necessity, the sphere in which human beings act according to instinct, and which stands in opposition to politics, the sphere in which human beings realize their capacity to reason and, thereby, distinguish themselves from lower forms of life. ^19s  

Marx broke with this tradition, not by supposing that humanity would escape from biological requirements, but by describing the family as an impermanent result of the historical collision between instinct and scarcity.  Once workers succeeded in bringing the abundance created by capitalism under their conscious control, the family, which was merely a vestige from an earlier stage of society, would vanish, and human beings would be free to develop emotional  relationships untouched by bourgeois possessiveness.  Marx did not say that that the realm of necessity would ever become a thing of the past, but he did predict that collective control of the means of production would enable both men and women to transcend the seemingly stultifying relationships that were glorified in books like as Life at Home.