The will to truth

Michel Foucault (Reference Foucault1979) wrote extensively on what he termed the will to truth as part of his analysis of the rise of scientific knowledge. His concern was not with the question of what was actually ‘true’ and what was not, but with the way in which claims to truth became seen as the most authentic mode of knowledge creation. Ultimately, in his account, claims to scientific truth could assert greater authenticity than other forms of knowledge such as belief, faith or religion. Thus a claim to truth was for him also a way of exercising power since power and knowledge were but two sides of the same coin. In the field of personal life, Foucault identified the rise of the ‘psy’ sciences and professions (psychoanalysis, psychiatry and psychology and so on) as crucial in the process of developing supposedly fundamental knowledge about the self. These new sciences also developed different methodologies for excavating the (supposedly) authentic truth of the person. One particular method he focused on was, of course, the talking cure (psychoanalysis) through which the individual was induced to tell everything about him/herself to the therapist in order to expose the ‘true’ self hidden in the unconscious. For Foucault this talking cure was the Catholic confession re-vamped in a scientific form, and he saw it as part of the modern governance of the self (both by the professions and by the individual) (Rose, Reference Rose1991). This method, which became popularised throughout the twentieth century (for example, through counselling and relationship manuals, viz Furedi, Reference Furedi2004; Giddens, Reference Giddens1992; Hazleden, Reference Hazleden2004), came to insist that the healthy self and the healthy relationship require truth telling and also deep and intimate revelations about one's most authentic, but most hidden, core. Importantly, in Foucault's analysis, much of what was deemed to be ‘core’ concerned matters of sexuality and so, at this micro-level, truth telling was focused intensively on sexual behaviour and desires.

Truth therefore, I suggest, has come to occupy a special place in personal life, or at least in how it is believed that personal life should be lived. It is perceived as the source of healing (of the self) and, normatively speaking, the only acceptable basis for ‘proper’ personal relationships. Hence, deceiving oneself is seen as leading to neuroses of various sorts, while deceiving those with whom one has a close relationship is seen automatically to jeopardise the quality of the bond and to undermine genuine feelings. Moreover, confiding intimacy has been elevated to being the core element in modern ‘pure relationships’ (Giddens, Reference Giddens1992) and the ability to reveal all one's most intimate feelings to one's intimates is seen to be the defining feature of democratic intimacy (Jamieson, Reference Jamieson1998, Reference Jamieson1999). In this broad context it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine, let alone support, the idea of keeping secrets in families and in relationships. Axiomatically such behaviour is deemed to be at best selfishly retentive and at worst harmful. It has perhaps become seen as so detrimental that law may be increasingly called upon to help uncover personal secrets and to expose them to scrutiny. For example, in recent decades English family law has become wedded to the idea of encouraging truth in matters to do with reproduction, parenthood and, most particularly although not exclusively, with paternity. The apparently inexorable rise of commercial paternity testing promoted as giving men ‘peace of mind’ and the increasing resort to ordering DNA tests in cases of disputed paternity are indicators of the ways in which legal truth is being increasingly forced into line with (what John Eekelaar, Reference Eekelaar2006, has called) ‘physical’ truth. In the realms of adoption and now assisted reproduction, it is increasingly frowned upon and actively discouraged for a parent or parents to mislead their children about their genetic inheritance. The days in which a genetic parent could be ‘erased’ or de-kinned (Konrad, Reference Konrad2005) appear to be vanishing, not least because the modern child's ontological security is understood to rest on knowing the truth of their conception (Carsten, Reference Carsten2000; Smith and Logan, Reference Smith and Logan2004). I stress the modern child because until roughly the 1960s, in the case of adoption, and the 1980s, in the case of assisted reproduction, ontological security was seen as resting in an ‘untruth’. Thus the child's belief that his or her social parent(s) was also his/her biological parent(s) was seen as entirely appropriate. What has happened over the last half century in the UK has therefore been a struggle over the place of truth in family relationships.

Eekelaar (Reference Eekelaar2006) has mounted an extremely compelling argument for the total alignment of legal and ‘physical’ truth. Only this way, he argues, can the shame of illegitimacy, adoption or infertility be overcome. His argument is based on two foundations. First, providing a modern day exemplar of Foucault's argument, he insists that proclamations of ‘real’ truth can sweep away outmoded and restrictive (harmful) beliefs. A combined legally enforced genetic truth is seen as a powerful way to eradicate superstition and bigotry because it has a greater claim to authenticity. Second, and most compellingly, he argues that the keeping of secrets about paternity and parenthood denies truth to the next generation and thus disenfranchises them from any claim to justice. Thus he argues that the older generation (for example, parents) keep reproductive or sexual secrets in order to protect their own powerful interests. In so doing he suggests parents deny their children the right to know or to have information which they could decide to use according to their own needs. He argues:

Eekelaar's argument is forceful, drawing as it does on the image of the innocent and vulnerable child at the mercy of self-interested adults who seek to preserve their social order and perpetuate it into the future. He sees the struggle over reproductive truth as a manifestation of generational power through which elders seek to control and manipulate the next generation. Unlike others who resort to the concept of the best interests of the child as the motive for insisting on reproductive truth (for example, Fortin, Reference Fortin1994), Eekelaar relies on claims to justice which children are deprived of if they are denied the truth of their genetic inception. So Eekelaar does not embroil himself in the problems of shifting normative values around child welfare, but rather resorts to a more universal claim to justice for each new generation based on the alignment of legal and ‘physical’ truth.

Given the strength of Eekelaar's claims it might seem misguided to argue against him because to do so would seem to reject enlightened thinking while simultaneously mounting a case in favour of lies, deceit and the manipulation of children. Yet there could be several problems with this proclamation in favour of (one) truth at any cost. In what follows I shall explore the complex area of family secrets. In so doing I wish to give a context to these secrets and to explore potential links between different kinds of reproductive secrets as they have changed their form over time. I want to question the idea that there is a simple ‘physical’ truth, for although there may now be some specific genetic truths that can be established, there are also other truths which may be just as important in family life. We need to consider how this one form of truth (genetic parentage) has become so overarching in significance. We also need to give consideration to how real people live with truths and untruths (or complexities of truths) and whether, in these matters, power is something that only flows down the generations. I shall argue that gendered power relations remain important, and that social and cultural context can also render simple claims to one easily understood truth more complicated than Eekelaar allows.

Kinship, relationships and the significance of genes

Sociological and anthropological approaches to understanding relationships – now referred to in anthropology as the new kinship studies (Carsten, Reference Carsten2004) – focus primarily on the meanings that people give to their relationships and their practices of kinning and de-kinning. That is to say that there is now less interest in formal understandings of blood ties or marriage ties, and a greater emphasis on the meanings and emotions people attach to those defined as kin (or relatives or simply as close) (Finch and Mason, Reference Finch and Mason1993, Reference Finch and Mason2000). These meanings are created and practised in various ways through rituals, such as birthdays or religious celebrations, through memory work and the keeping of photos and mementoes and the telling of stories, through to practical caring and sharing (Gillis, Reference Gillis, Etzioni and Bloom2004; Miller, Reference Miller2001; Smart, Reference Smart2007). Qualities of affection, norms of reciprocation, attentiveness to personhood and so on, all combine to create bonds which in turn can be more important than blood or genetic ties. Notwithstanding this emphasis on the quality of relationships, in a parallel world of cultural meanings, blood or genetic links do carry special meanings. This specialness should not imply that these links indicate good-quality relationships, but, even where such relationships are poor, they occupy a kind of iconic status in the cultural and personal imaginary. Both anthropological and sociological work on kinship increasingly reveal that people have complex relationships with both relatives and others defined as close or as elective kin (Weeks et al., Reference Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan2001; Weston, Reference Weston1997). The clichés ‘Blood is thicker than water’ and ‘You can choose your friends but not your family’ seem to be equally prevalent and now, in addition, more people refer to families of choice, often meaning a mélange of genetic kin and elective kin or friends (Spencer and Pahl, Reference Spencer and Pahl2006). This means that it is possible to hold a range of contradictory views, often deploying different clichés in different contexts, but adhering to all of them without apparent ontological insecurity.

Returning to the points above about whether there is a clear distinction between so-called ‘physical’ truth and legal truth (and so whether further measures should be taken to bring them into line), it seems important to be attentive to these kinds of complexities of kinship. The problem with Eekelaar's approach is that he seems to imagine that establishing kinship is straightforward (at least now that we have DNA testing), but he seems to forget that kinship is nested in relationships which are lived and meaningful. Legal truth (founded exclusively on genetic testing) can cut through and disrupt these relationships. For Eekelaar this is not a problem because it is seen as a means of achieving power for the weakest member, namely the child. However, it is not clear that the secrets he wishes to force into daylight are simple matters of parents' power over their children. For example, the desire to keep paternity a secret may well be a way of protecting a child and not merely a way of saving face for an adult (Turney, Reference Turney2005). Revealing to a husband that a child was conceived from a passing affair could mean divorce and poverty for both mother and child, so the child may live a life in the full knowledge of her paternity, but s/he may be materially impoverished as well. In exploring these issues I want to turn to an exploratory study on family secrets.

Mass Observation Archive

In 2000 Dorothy Sheridan of the Mass Observation Archive (MOB) sent out a DirectiveFootnote ⁴ to members inviting them to write on their family life. One hundred and sixty eight women and 50 men replied to this Directive, some writing at considerable length. One of the specific questions embedded in the broad framework of family life was on family secrets. Not all the respondents to the Directive chose to address this issue; indeed a few were offended at its inclusion. However, 85 (50 per cent) of the women and 27 (54 per cent) of the men said something about family secrets. The population of people who write for Mass Observation (MO) are predominantly middle-class retired professionals. Among the women who responded to this Directive the main profession was teachers, followed by clerical workers, administrators, librarians and civil servants. A number simply described themselves as housewives, but the impression given was that the majority of these also were middle-class. The typical occupations for the men respondents were similar, but also included managers and engineers of various sorts. There were some respondents from manual occupations (for men this was 16 per cent, for women it was harder to determine), but without doubt this was a skewed sample in terms of social class. In respect of age the largest group of men (44 per cent) were between 70 and 79 years, reflecting the fact that writing for MO appears to be something people take up when they are retired. The women were more evenly distributed, with the largest group (27 per cent) aged between 60 and 69, and the rest more or less evenly spread in the age bands 40–49, 50–59 and 70–79 years (18, 20 and 21 per cent respectively). There were ‘outliers’ in the 30–39 and 80–89 age groups (6 per cent each) and 2 per cent in the 20–29 range.

The nature of this sample, containing as it did many engaged in amateur genealogy and many with very long personal memories and documentary evidence, allowed me to trace the ways in which family secrets appear to have changed over the decades. A note of caution is necessary here, however, because although the stories of secrets told ‘fit’ well with documented histories of prevalence of illegitimacy, informal adoptions, hidden pregnancies and so on (Gill, Reference Gill1977; Laslett, Reference Laslett1977; McLaren, Reference McLaren1978; Sauer, Reference Sauer1978; Smart, Reference Smart and Smart1992; Spensky, Reference Spensky and Smart1992), these stories are sometimes based on rather dim recollections and even on unsolved family mysteries. Some were more clearly accredited with official documents such as birth certificates, but even so the respondents to the MO Directives are engaged in constructing narratives rather than writing factual histories and so their stories should be read with this knowledge in mind (Sheridan et al., Reference Sheridan, Street and Bloome2000). The composition of this sample of respondents might also be seen as a problem to sociological research because it is clearly not representative and is entirely voluntaristic. Yet as far as this study was concerned, this composition of predominantly middle-class writers was potentially a bonus. This is because of the cultural relationship between class position and perceived respectability. While the secrets of both middle- and working-class families might be of equal interest, there is something particularly significant in the discovery that middle-class families (and aspiring middle-class families) had many secrets that they were anxious to keep from public knowledge. If it were not for this archival collection, we might have few other ways of accessing the family secrets of the middle classes in the recent past. The secrets reveal how fragile respectability could and can be, but also show how cultural and social resources can be deployed to keep them from public knowledge.

It is of course also important to consider what is meant by a family secret since this is far from self-evident. This small study cannot claim to have access to all possible varieties of secret, as obviously Mass Observers would only write about the things they felt (relatively) comfortable revealing or indeed things they knew (or had found out) about. There are likely to be whole seams of secrecy that are not revealed in the Archive. But, arising from the kinds of things that Mass Observers were willing to reveal, it would seem that family secrets fall into several different categories. There were secrets about distressing illnesses or disabilities, and often mental illnesses were ‘hushed up’ by families. Financial irregularities or disputes over inheritances were also mentioned, but these were too rare to form any clear pattern. Secrets over homosexuality were also prevalent, but because the MO archivists asked a specific question about gays and lesbians in the family at the same time as asking about family secrets, narratives on the secrecy of sexual orientations were not spontaneous. This means that some respondents did link homosexuality with secrecy in the past (even the recent past) but many wrote about it outside the conceptual framework of secrecy. For this reason I shall not discuss responses on homosexuality here. The largest category of secrets I discovered in the MO accounts concerned reproductive secrets. These included accounts of illegitimacy, informal adoptions, premarital conceptions and secrets surrounding illicit conceptions and assisted conceptions. Of the 85 women who spoke of having secrets in their families, there were 54 accounts of this kind of secret. For the 27 men, there were 18 stories of this kind. There seems therefore to be a custom of secrecy around irregular reproductive issues and it might be possible to suggest that contemporary secrecy over assisted reproduction has its precursor in secrecy over illegitimacy, adoption and also paternity. I shall therefore attempt to map the chronology of these secrets in the MO accounts and will also seek to situate them in the legal and social (and religious) context of their times.

The context of reproductive secrecy

I suggest that there is a need to situate reproductive secrets in their historical background and that this process may lead to an understanding that openness and secrecy in families are not simply matters of individual integrity but also of social, legal and cultural context. Although personal morality is an issue here, it is problematic to insist that those who keep secrets are manipulative or disingenuous unless one also has an understanding of context. This context not only allows for an appreciation of why certain things are deemed shameful (and hence need to be kept secret) at certain times, but also why they lose their stigma when, for example, the law changes. But it is also possible to see how ‘new’ secrets become necessary as social conditions change and this, in turn, alerts us to the problem of imagining that keeping reproductive secrets is some leftover practice of a bygone age which is out of place in modern times.

In reading the family stories in the MO archive it is possible to discern a rough chronology of reproductive secrets, which, as I note above, fits with documented histories of illicit reproduction. Stories concerning the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were replete with accounts of illegitimacy. Thus people in their 50s and 60s would often tell stories of grandparents who were either illegitimate, or who had a child who was illegitimate. These stories often told of the babies being raised by grandparents or other relatives who could include them easily with their existing children.

These stories also included ones where a child might be born illegitimately and sent off to relatives or adopted formally, but where the same couple then went on to marry and have legitimate children who were therefore full sibling to the adopted child. Even in these cases, it seemed that the legitimate children might not be told of the existence of their illegitimate sibling. These accounts also often focused on ‘confusions’ around the dates of births, deaths and marriages. At a time when ‘official’ certificates were rare and when stories of their loss or accidental destruction could more or less safeguard a secret, it seems that parents sought to disguise the fact of premarital conception and sometimes premarital birth. Of course, at the beginning of the twentieth century, both premarital birth and premarital conception gave rise to the status of illegitimacy for the child, and so parents who went on to marry would have very strong motivation to hide the discrepancy over dates. Moreover, when birth certificates were available, it seems that some grandparents insisted that a child was born prematurely so as not to give away the fact of a premarital conception. In two cases in the Archive there was ‘confusion’ over the date, and even the fact of the death of a husband which later turned out to be a means of ‘legitimating’ a subsequent marriage and the children born to the couple.

The shame of having an illegitimate child weakened as the twentieth century unfolded and this is almost certainly linked to the incremental changes made to the laws on bastardy. It became possible, for example, to legitimise a child conceived or even born before marriage if the couple were both free to marry at the time of the conception. However, illegitimacy was still a dreaded status and it is clear from the MO accounts that pre-marital conceptions were a matter of great shame (and hence the tendency for shotgun weddings) throughout the first half of the twentieth century and beyond.

The focus on illegitimacy gave way in the accounts to stories of formal adoption in the 1950s and 1960s. These were mostly tales from adults who had discovered that they were adopted often quite late in life. The fact that adoptive parents kept the status of their children secret was entirely customary at the time. It was not regarded as a deceit but as a way of protecting the best interests of the child, and of course of preserving the respectability of the families involved. The process of recording the adoptive parents as legal parents on birth certificates also obscured the genetic parentage of formally adopted children. Moreover, in many cases of formal adoptions in the 1950s and 1960s, birth mothers were advised to forget about their illegitimate children and to return to ‘normal’ life where they could later marry and have proper, legitimate children (Spensky, Reference Spensky and Smart1992). In the MO archives there were two or three accounts from women who knew of relatives who had been sent, or who were sent themselves, to Mother and Baby Homes to have their illegitimate children in secret. Ironically, as informal adoption practices were replaced by formal procedures in the post-war decades, secrecy surrounding genetic parentage became even more impenetrable. In the MO stories of informal adoption it appears that children often found out about their ‘real’ parents because neighbours or other relatives knew the whole story and at some stage let it out. Equally, some MO narrators spoke of a relative who discovered they were informally adopted when requiring permission to marry under the age of 21 or on acquiring their birth certificate for the same purpose. Informal adoptions could therefore be fairly leaky secrets, while the later formal adoptions were much more unyielding in their ability to preserve secrecy.

Many of the MO narrators were telling personal stories of old family secrets which affected their forefathers, or sometimes horizontal kin, but which were stories located in a specific moment in history. Few gave the impression that they realised that their particular secret was likely to be common-place nor did many seem to appreciate why their parents or grandparents were so determined to keep certain things secret. Some wrote in a rather bemused way about why people in the past would have thought it so important to hide a pre-marital conception, perhaps little knowing about its legal and social consequences for a child.

Others thought that these secrets gave character to otherwise rather shadowy figures from the past:

However, not all reproductive secrets were so ancient. Some secrets revealed in the Archive were current and some concerned living kin or even the narrator's own living children. These secrets could involve either the longstanding dilemma of paternity uncertainty or more contemporary dilemmas arising from new forms of assisted reproduction. Hence the following account was written by the sister of a woman who had an affair and became pregnant, but who never told her husband that the child was not his. Unfortunately she told her sister (the narrator) who had to carry the burdensome secret with her for years:

Another narrator wrote of her quandary over knowing about the conception of her granddaughter and yet realising that it has become, over time, a secret:

It would seem that ‘old’ secrets over illegitimacy, premarital conceptions and adoption have given way to ‘newer’ dilemmas arising from assisted reproduction. This changing pattern of secrets is, as I have noted above, clearly linked with (although not necessarily caused by) changes to the law governing these areas of family life. For example, Martin Richards (2006) has traced the complex relationships between law and paternity in England from Artificial Insemination by Donor (AID – now known as assisted insemination) to the rise of DNA testing in the late 1990s. In so doing he outlines the ways in which law and policy have dealt with reproductive ‘fictions’, turning those fictions which were defined as in the public interest into legal facts, while rejecting others and seeking to punish their perpetrators. Thus, for example, he quotes from the 1984 Warnock Committee Report in their recommendation that a child conceived by a woman of AID should be treated legally as the offspring of her husband, thus conferring legitimacy on the infant. The Committee stated:

The question therefore that should perhaps be asked when confronted by reproductive secrets is why some are (or have been) condoned and even encouraged, and why some increasingly or newly invite censure and approbation. In returning to Eekelaar's proposition about the need to align ‘physical’ truth with legal truth, we might also ask what the consequences of this re-alignment might be. Should the sister (above) who knows her nephew is not the child of her brother-in-law now be able to invoke the law in order to tell both of them? Should the grandmother (above) above tell her grandchild or be able to use the law to force her son to tell her how she was conceived? It is important therefore to consider what absolute truth telling might mean in families when it concerns paternity and reproductive issues. In order to explore this I shall now turn to two recent studies.