ABSTRACT
For people who want privacy, there may be no place like home. Whether an ordinary row-house or an extraordinary houseboat, the residential dwelling is where American custom and law generally allow one the greatest freedom to look, speak, and behave as one pleases. Business and amusement outside the home call for a mode of conduct and appearance calculated to avoid unwanted attention and interference. In the workplace, punctuality, productivity, skill, and decorum are closely monitored by employers and co-workers. It is easy to covet the privacy of the superrich, the superannuated, those, typically women, who stay home to keep house or rear children. Yet, for women with families at home to care for, staying at home is not always a privacy blessing. Marriage, motherhood, housekeeping, dependence, and her own moral ideas of caretaking and belonging have made many a woman's homelife a privacy bane rather than boon.
