The Strange History of Privacy
How We Learned to Live Behind Closed Doors
Imagine stepping into an ordinary family home two hundred years ago. Depending on where you found yourself, you might discover several generations sharing sleeping quarters, meals prepared and consumed in common spaces, and daily routines unfolding in the constant presence of relatives, neighbors, and visitors. Activities that many of us now regard as intensely private might take place with little physical separation from others. Yet the people inhabiting these spaces would not necessarily have experienced their lives as lacking something essential. They had their own understandings of privacy, intimacy, propriety, and personal boundaries, even if those understandings differed considerably from ours.
Today, we tend to take the architecture of privacy for granted. We expect bedrooms to have doors, bathrooms to have locks, and individuals to possess spaces into which others may not intrude. We teach children to respect personal boundaries, distinguish carefully between public and private behavior, and often regard the ability to withdraw from others as a fundamental condition of personal freedom. These expectations are so deeply embedded in everyday life that it can be difficult to imagine organizing society differently.
But the history of privacy is considerably stranger, more complicated, and more revealing than we might suppose. Across centuries and cultures, people have drawn the boundaries between public and private life in remarkably different places. And in tracing those boundaries, we discover something important not only about the societies of the past, but also about the assumptions that govern our own lives.
A World Without So Many Doors
For much of human history, the organization of domestic life differed considerably from the arrangements familiar to many people today. In numerous societies, households extended beyond the nuclear family, incorporating grandparents, relatives, servants, apprentices, or other members of the community. Sleeping arrangements were frequently shared, and rooms served multiple purposes rather than being reserved for particular activities.
In parts of early modern Europe, for example, beds could accommodate several people, while domestic spaces often lacked the architectural divisions that characterize contemporary homes. The distinction between a room for sleeping, a room for eating, and a room for receiving visitors was not always clearly established. Even where wealthy households enjoyed elaborate interiors, the modern expectation that every individual should possess a separate bedroom was far from universal.
These arrangements reflected practical realities, including limited space, the expense of heating, and the economic organization of households. Yet they also reflected different expectations about social proximity. Living alongside others was not necessarily experienced as an intrusion upon an otherwise private existence. It was simply part of the ordinary fabric of daily life.
None of this means that people lacked a desire for privacy. Historical scholarship has demonstrated that individuals sought solitude, secrecy, and personal boundaries in many different ways. A secluded garden, a quiet corner, a private conversation, or even a moment of withdrawal from the household could provide forms of privacy that did not depend upon possessing an individual room.
What differed was not necessarily the human capacity to value privacy, but the social and architectural arrangements through which it could be achieved.
The Communal Organization of Everyday Life
The historical differences become even more apparent when we move beyond the household. Many activities now conducted privately were once organized around shared spaces and collective routines.
Consider the ordinary task of washing clothes. Across Europe, communal washhouses, public washing facilities, and riverside laundry sites brought people together to perform work that is now largely confined to individual households. In French villages, the lavoir was often an important social institution, a place where women gathered to wash clothing, exchange information, and maintain relationships within the community. Similar arrangements existed elsewhere, although their forms varied according to local customs, geography, and available infrastructure.
These spaces were not necessarily idyllic. Washing clothes was physically demanding labor, and communal settings could become places of gossip, conflict, and social surveillance. Yet they also provided opportunities for interaction that became less common as domestic technologies and changing expectations increasingly relocated household activities behind private doors.
The same transformation can be observed in the preparation and consumption of food. Boardinghouses, communal kitchens, shared dining facilities, and extended households brought people together around activities that modern domestic architecture increasingly organizes within self-contained homes.
Urban courtyards offer another revealing example. In many densely populated neighborhoods, shared outdoor spaces served as extensions of domestic life. Children played while adults worked, socialized, or attended to household tasks. The boundaries between family life and neighborhood life were often porous, allowing everyday relationships to develop through repeated, informal encounters.
As housing standards changed and individual households acquired more private facilities, many of these arrangements became less common. The spread of domestic appliances, indoor plumbing, and larger homes brought undeniable improvements in convenience, sanitation, and comfort. But it also changed the social geography of everyday life. Activities that once brought neighbors into regular contact could increasingly be performed without encountering anyone outside the household.
The consequences were not simply technological. They were social.
The Architecture of Privacy
The transformation of privacy is written into the architecture of our homes. Historians of domestic life have documented how changing ideas about family, individuality, respectability, and social status contributed to the gradual differentiation of household spaces. In parts of Europe, particularly among prosperous households, rooms increasingly acquired specialized functions. Bedrooms became more clearly separated from reception rooms, corridors allowed people to move through homes without passing through occupied chambers, and domestic arrangements increasingly distinguished between family members, visitors, and servants.
These changes unfolded unevenly over several centuries. They were shaped by wealth, urbanization, industrialization, and cultural expectations, and they cannot be reduced to a single moment when privacy was supposedly invented. Nevertheless, they reveal how architecture came to embody increasingly elaborate distinctions between different kinds of social interaction.
The modern bedroom offers a particularly interesting example. For many children growing up in affluent societies today, having one’s own bedroom is regarded as an important element of personal development. It provides space for individuality, self-expression, and withdrawal from family life. Yet the widespread expectation that children should have separate rooms is historically recent and remains far from universal.
A similar transformation can be observed in bathrooms. Indoor plumbing brought enormous public health benefits, but the development of the private bathroom also contributed to the idea that washing, dressing, and attending to bodily needs should ordinarily occur away from the gaze of others.
Over time, these arrangements came to feel natural. The architecture no longer appeared to express a particular set of cultural expectations; it simply seemed to represent the proper way to organize domestic life. This is one of the remarkable features of social norms. Once incorporated into the physical environment, they become increasingly difficult to recognize as historically contingent. Walls, doors, corridors, and partitions quietly teach us where one person's world is expected to end and another's begins.
When Bathing Was a Social Activity
Few activities illustrate the changing boundaries of privacy as clearly as bathing. Across different historical periods and cultural settings, bathing has frequently been a communal rather than an exclusively private activity. The public baths of the Roman world, the hammams of the Ottoman Empire, the sentō of Japan, and the sauna traditions of northern Europe all demonstrate that washing the body need not be understood as something requiring complete separation from others.
These institutions differed enormously in their organization, social meanings, and expectations concerning nudity, gender, and appropriate behavior. Roman bathing establishments were not identical to Japanese bathhouses, nor did Finnish sauna traditions necessarily resemble those of neighboring societies. Nevertheless, they shared an important characteristic: bathing could be incorporated into collective social life without automatically being understood as a violation of personal dignity.
In many communities, public bathing facilities also served practical purposes. Before private bathrooms became widespread, municipal bathhouses and school bathing programs provided access to washing facilities that might otherwise have been unavailable or difficult to use. Public hygiene was an important concern of nineteenth- and twentieth-century reform movements, and collective washing facilities formed part of broader efforts to improve living conditions.
Yet communal bathing was not always simply a substitute for private facilities. In societies where bathing remained a valued social practice, people continued to visit communal establishments even when they had the means to wash at home. The bathhouse could serve as a place of relaxation, sociability, ritual, and cultural continuity.
This complicates the assumption that increasing prosperity must inevitably lead people to abandon communal arrangements. Whether bathing is understood primarily as a private necessity or a shared social experience depends partly upon the cultural meanings attached to it.
When Walls Become Necessary
Sometimes the changing boundaries of privacy can be observed not across centuries, but within the lifespan of a single building.
London’s Camberwell Leisure Centre offers a particularly revealing example. Photographs of its shower facilities before a major renovation show a row of showerheads arranged within a shared space. Curtains appear to have served primarily to contain splashing water rather than to separate individual bathers from one another. In other words, shower curtains were there for practical purposes, not for modesty. Photographs taken after renovation show a substantially different arrangement, with individual shower cubicles providing visual separation between users.
The center’s refurbishment began in 2009, with the renovated swimming pools and associated changing facilities reopening in February 2011. The transformation coincided with a broader movement toward greater individual privacy in the design of public sports facilities. What makes this example especially interesting is that the change was not simply a matter of individual preference or architectural fashion. By the early twenty-first century, expectations about bodily privacy were increasingly being incorporated into institutional design standards.
Sport England’s 2011 swimming-pool guidance, for example, identified individual changing cubicles as an important means of accommodating different users and recommended arrangements that provided greater flexibility, privacy, and accessibility. Although the guidance still recognized open-plan single-sex changing areas, it generally favored arrangements offering individual cubicles.
Other sports organizations have gone further. The Football Foundation’s guidance for changing pavilions advises designers to avoid open shower arrangements and, where feasible, provide at least four individual shower cubicles within each team changing room. These recommendations are framed around inclusion, safeguarding, and ensuring that facilities accommodate users with different needs and preferences.
The shift is significant. An arrangement that earlier generations might have regarded as entirely ordinary is increasingly discouraged in the design of new or renovated facilities. Expectations about bodily privacy have acquired institutional authority, influencing the spaces in which people exercise, wash, and socialize.
There are understandable reasons for these developments. Individual cubicles may make facilities more welcoming to people who would otherwise avoid communal changing areas, including those with particular religious, cultural, physical, or personal needs. Providing opportunities for privacy can expand participation and protect individual dignity.
Yet the transformation also raises an interesting question about the relationship between architecture and social norms. Buildings do not merely reflect the expectations of the societies that construct them. They also help reproduce those expectations. A child who grows up using communal showers may learn that washing in the presence of others is an ordinary part of everyday life. A child whose only experience is of individual shower cubicles may instead come to regard visual separation as an essential condition of the activity. Neither conclusion necessarily requires explicit instruction. The physical environment itself communicates what is normal.
And because these lessons are learned through ordinary experience, they can become remarkably resistant to questioning.
Learning Privacy, Learning Community
For generations of children in parts of northern Europe, communal showering after physical education was simply part of the school routine. Students exercised together, changed clothes together, and washed together before returning to their classrooms. The practice was often regarded as an ordinary element of school hygiene rather than as an unusual form of bodily exposure.
Such arrangements could serve an important educational purpose. Children learned the practical routines of personal hygiene, while schools provided access to washing facilities and basic sanitary expectations that might not have been equally available in every household. Communal bathing could therefore have a social dimension extending beyond the immediate activity of washing.
But these experiences were not necessarily as egalitarian as nostalgic recollections might suggest. Children could be cruel to one another, and differences in physical development, body shape, or appearance sometimes became occasions for ridicule. For those on the receiving end, the absence of privacy could be a source of considerable distress. Any serious reflection on the history of communal bathing must acknowledge these experiences rather than romanticize the past. Yet these difficulties also raise an important question about how children learn to understand human bodies.
When bodily differences are encountered only rarely, or primarily through idealized representations in advertising and popular culture, they may come to seem more unusual than they actually are. Ordinary encounters with a diversity of bodies can offer a different point of reference, particularly when accompanied by an environment of mutual respect.
Exposure alone, however, does not guarantee acceptance. Children can learn prejudice just as readily as they can learn tolerance, and the behavior of adults and peers plays a crucial role in shaping how physical differences are interpreted. A genuinely positive environment must teach children that bodies develop differently, that human appearances vary enormously, and that no one’s physical characteristics make them less deserving of dignity.
Equally important, children need to understand that respecting another person’s body includes respecting their boundaries and their right to privacy. This distinction is central. The objective should not be to eliminate privacy for the sake of eliminating privacy or insist that everyone instantly become comfortable with communal bathing. It should be to cultivate a culture in which bodily differences are neither surprising nor grounds for judgment, and where people can participate in shared experiences without fear of humiliation.
Privacy can protect individuals from judgment in the moment, but it cannot, by itself, eliminate the social prejudices that make such protection necessary. In fact, the “architecture of privacy,” currently guiding so many public space renovations, may reinforce and reify social prejudices, whereas the old architecture encouraged exposure to the glorious diversity that is humanity. We should design our public spaces in a way that naturally introduces our youngest members to the full breadth of the human creation, which includes proper disability access and consistent social conditioning that teaches them to respect the bodies of others.
In the longer scheme of things, once social prejudices are eliminated, the need for individual shower stalls in public spaces will be eliminated as well and future architects will once more be designing open shower solutions. After all, a different interpretation of what is “safe” and “proper” would lead people to find an open shower room both safer and more hygienic than individual stalls, which can also become sites of assault away from public view and germ-filled cesspools because they are more difficult to clean.
The Unequal Distribution of Privacy
There is another aspect of privacy’s history that deserves particular attention: the ability to withdraw from others has never been equally distributed. For much of history, privacy was closely connected to material circumstances. Wealthy households could afford separate chambers, extensive living spaces, and architectural arrangements that allowed family members to regulate their interactions. Poorer households often lacked such possibilities, not necessarily because their inhabitants valued privacy less, but because their circumstances offered fewer opportunities to achieve it.
The contrast is visible in historical photographs of crowded urban housing, institutional dormitories, and large hospital wards. Rows of beds arranged in shared rooms remind us that the ability to sleep, recover from illness, or simply exist without the immediate presence of strangers was frequently shaped by economic and institutional conditions. Privacy could therefore function as both a form of personal freedom and a marker of social privilege.
The expansion of private domestic facilities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries represented a significant improvement in living standards for many people. Access to individual bathrooms, more spacious housing, and opportunities for solitude should not be dismissed as merely the products of changing cultural attitudes. They could provide genuine improvements in comfort, dignity, safety, and autonomy.
Yet it is equally important to recognize that the relationship between privacy and freedom is not always straightforward. A private home may offer refuge from public scrutiny, but it can also conceal domestic violence, reinforce social isolation, or place the burdens of caregiving almost entirely upon individual households. Communal arrangements may encourage solidarity and mutual assistance, but they can also expose individuals to unwanted observation, pressure, or coercion. Neither privacy nor community is inherently liberating. Their consequences depend upon the social relationships and institutions within which they are organized.
The Private Body and the Public Image
One of the more curious contradictions of contemporary life is that ordinary human bodies have become increasingly private while idealized representations of those same bodies have become almost impossible to escape.
In many public facilities, architectural arrangements increasingly shield people from encountering one another's unclothed bodies. Yet outside these spaces, advertising, entertainment, and digital media surround us with images of bodies selected, styled, edited, and presented according to particular standards of attractiveness. The contrast is striking. The ordinary human body, with its natural variations in shape, age, proportion, and appearance, is increasingly concealed from everyday view, while carefully curated versions of the body occupy an enormous amount of public visual space.
This does not mean that contemporary societies have become uniformly more modest. In some respects, bodily display has become more prominent than ever. But the bodies we encounter through commercial imagery are not necessarily representative of the diversity of bodies that exist around us.
The distinction matters because our understanding of what is normal is shaped partly by what we encounter. If everyday bodily diversity becomes less visible while idealized images become more pervasive, the range of appearances we regard as ordinary may become increasingly narrow.
This is particularly relevant to children and young people, whose perceptions of their own bodies develop within a social environment saturated with messages about attractiveness, physical development, and acceptable appearance.
It would be too simplistic to suggest that communal bathing alone could resolve these pressures. Nor should anyone be expected to surrender personal privacy in the name of body positivity. But the contrast invites us to question a cultural arrangement in which ordinary bodies are treated as something to conceal while commercially idealized bodies are presented as objects of constant public attention.
Perhaps the problem is not that we see too much of the human body, but that we encounter too narrow a representation of what human bodies actually look like.
What Did We Gain, and What Did We Lose?
The gradual expansion of private space has brought substantial benefits. People have gained greater opportunities to establish personal boundaries, regulate social interactions, and withdraw from unwanted attention. Privacy can protect individuality, facilitate independent thought, and provide essential safeguards against interference by others. These achievements should not be underestimated.
But the increasing privatization of everyday life has also transformed the ways in which people encounter one another. When laundry moves from the village washhouse into the home, when meals move from shared dining facilities into separate kitchens, and when recreation shifts from communal spaces into individualized environments, opportunities for spontaneous social interaction may diminish. Activities that once required cooperation or brought people into regular contact can increasingly be completed alone.
Of course, communal life has not simply disappeared. People continue to gather in schools, workplaces, religious institutions, sports clubs, public parks, and countless other settings. New forms of community have emerged alongside the decline of older ones. Nevertheless, the spatial organization of everyday life influences how frequently we encounter others, how relationships develop, and how much of our existence unfolds beyond the boundaries of the individual household.
The contemporary paradox is that many people enjoy greater domestic privacy than earlier generations while simultaneously experiencing loneliness and social disconnection. These developments cannot be explained by architecture alone, and it would be misleading to suggest that private bedrooms or bathrooms are responsible for modern isolation. But they invite us to consider whether the organization of physical space contributes to broader patterns of social life.
Perhaps the question is not whether earlier generations lived better or worse than we do, but whether our own arrangements have become so familiar that we struggle to imagine meaningful alternatives.
Privacy as a Choice, Not a Commandment
The history of privacy offers no simple lesson about how human beings ought to live. It does not suggest that communal arrangements were necessarily more authentic, that earlier generations enjoyed healthier relationships with their bodies, or that modern expectations of personal space are somehow mistaken.
What it does reveal is the extraordinary diversity of ways in which people have organized the boundaries between themselves and others. The private bedroom, the individual shower cubicle, the enclosed household, and the separation of domestic activities from communal life are not inevitable expressions of human nature. They are particular arrangements shaped by historical circumstances, technological developments, economic conditions, and cultural expectations.
Other arrangements have existed, and many continue to exist today. This recognition is important because social conventions often become most restrictive when we cease to recognize them as conventions. What begins as one possible way of organizing life can gradually acquire the authority of an unquestionable moral principle. Privacy becomes something that must always be maximized, while openness and communal experience are increasingly treated as departures from the norm.
Yet meaningful personal freedom requires more than the ability to withdraw from others. It also requires the freedom to participate in shared experiences without unnecessary stigma, to encounter human diversity without fear or judgment, and to develop relationships that extend beyond the boundaries of our private lives.
A society that respects individual autonomy should make room for both privacy and community. It should recognize that people differ in their needs, preferences, and circumstances, and that neither solitude nor togetherness should be imposed as a universal ideal. Perhaps the most revealing thing about the history of privacy is not how much our ancestors were willing to share, but how readily we have come to regard our own boundaries as natural and permanent.
The walls around us may be real, but the meanings we attach to them are human creations. And what human beings have created, they also possess the capacity to reconsider. In our Community, we seek a future where the human body is respected and cared for as a temple by each individual, but also public spaces that facilitate such respect and care while signaling the undramatic nature of the diverse human body. In short, we want a future where no one has to feel the need for a private cubicle after their workout because they know they are fully accepted and loved as the divine beings they truly are. When everyone accepts each other as equals, there is no need for separation.
References and publication notes
Historical and sociological scholarship
Ariès, Philippe, and Georges Duby, eds. (1987–1991). A History of Private Life. 5 vols. Harvard University Press.
Elias, Norbert (2000 [1939]). The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Blackwell.
Rybczynski, Witold (1986). Home: A Short History of an Idea. Viking.
Vigarello, Georges (1988). Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press.
Goffman, Erving (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday.
Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Doubleday.
Contemporary primary sources
Sport England (2011), Swimming Pools: Design Guidance Note — particularly section 4.5 on changing facilities.
Football Foundation, Changing Pavilion Design: Key Considerations — guidance on shower cubicles, inclusivity, and safeguarding.
Southwark Council (2011), Cabinet Reports Pack, September 20, 2011
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