Deborah Cohen

Deborah Cohen is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Northwestern University. Her most recent book is Family Secrets (2013). She can be reached at deborah-cohen@northwestern.edu.


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Writing on Public Books

Her Mother and Herself

Do you hear a sound like rolling surf in the self-help section labeled “Family”? It’s what a sea change sounds like in its early stages, when one paradigm is fading away and another surging forward. Drifting away is the idea of the repressive family, out to “fuck you up,” in Philip Larkin’s phrase of 1971.1 […]