The Face That Launched a Thousand Lawsuits: The American Women Who Forged a Right to Privacy (Yale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference)

The advent of the photographic and cinematic camera in the mid to late 19^th^ century caused new harms to individuals (particularly women), which existing laws (copyright, defamation, trespass) were inadequate to address. This book demonstrates that women forged a ‘right to privacy’ in the United States by bringing lawsuits claiming control and ownership over filmed images (still and moving) of their faces, bodies and narratives. At a time when they still lacked civil and political rights, women employed ‘a right to privacy’ to prevent themselves being reduced to nameless ‘pretty’ objects; to protest the transformation of their bodies into spectacles of ‘monstrosity’; to limit their exposure on the big screen to the mass ‘gaze’ of audiences; to control the development of their careers in paid work as models, dancers and actresses; and to reclaim their personal life stories from exploitation by film studios. Case documents also reveal the nexus between privacy claims and arguments by the subjects of images for property rights in them (eventuating in the right to publicity). This book interrogates the gender of privacy law and shows how privacy emerged as an ambiguous claim for women – it both reinforced traditional stereotypes of femininity or womanhood and progressed the feminist aspirations of the New Woman for greater self-determination and self-articulation. It shows that visual crimes against women occurring today via the Internet, such as revenge pornography or non-consensual pornography, have an important legal, social and political history. The advent of the photographic and cinematic camera in the mid to late 19 th century caused new harms to individuals (particularly women), which existing laws (copyright, defamation, trespass) were inadequate to address. This book demonstrates that women forged a ‘right to privacy’ in the United States by bringing lawsuits claiming control and ownership over filmed images (still and moving) of their faces, bodies and narratives. At a time when they still lacked civil and political rights, women employed ‘a right to privacy’ to prevent themselves being reduced to nameless ‘pretty’ objects; to protest the transformation of their bodies into spectacles of ‘monstrosity’; to limit their exposure on the big screen to the mass ‘gaze’ of audiences; to control the development of their careers in paid work as models, dancers and actresses; and to reclaim their personal life stories from exploitation by film studios. Case documents also reveal the nexus between privacy claims and arguments by the subjects of images for property rights in them (eventuating in the right to publicity). This book interrogates the gender of privacy law and shows how privacy emerged as an ambiguous claim for women - it both reinforced traditional stereotypes of femininity or womanhood and progressed the feminist aspirations of the New Woman for greater self-determination and self-articulation. It shows that visual crimes against women occurring today via the Internet, such as revenge pornography or non-consensual pornography, have an important legal, social and political history In This Book I Offer A New History Of The Evolution Of Privacy Law In The United States That Places The Legal Activism Of Individual Women Front And Center, Women Such As The Feisty Abigail Roberson, Coney Island High Diver Mabel Colyer, The Private Detective Grace Humiston, Kansas Housewife Stella Kunz, Broadway Star Gladys Loftus, African American Dancer Pauline Myers, And California Society Matron Gabrielle Melvin--page 2. Setting The Scene : Proliferating Pictures And The Advent Of Photography And Cinema -- Has A Beautiful Girl The Right To Her Own Face? : Privacy, Propriety, And Property -- Medical Men And Peeping Toms : Spectacles Of Monstrosity And The Camera's Corporeal Violations -- Privacy, The Celluloid City, And The Cinematic Eye -- Privacy For Profit And A Right Of Publicity -- Hollywood Heroes And Shameful Hookers : Privacy Moves West. Jessica Lake. Previously Issued As Author's Doctoral Dissertation, University Of Melbourne. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 275-293) And Index. A compelling account of how women shaped the common law right to privacy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Drawing on a wealth of original research, Jessica Lake documents how the advent of photography and cinema drove women—whose images were being taken and circulated without their consent—to court. There they championed the creation of new laws and laid the groundwork for America’s commitment to privacy. Vivid and engagingly written, this powerful work will draw scholars and students from a range of fields, including law, women’s history, the history of photography, and cinema and media studies. Contents 7 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 15 One Setting the Scene: Proliferating Pictures and the Advent of Photography and Cinema 33 Two “Has a Beautiful Girl the Right to Her Own Face?” Privacy, Propriety, and Property 57 Three Medical Men and Peeping Toms: Spectacles of Monstrosity and the Camera’s Corporeal Violations 103 Four Privacy, the Celluloid City, and the Cinematic Eye 131 Five Privacy for Profit and a Right of Publicity 164 Six Hollywood Heroes and Shameful Hookers: Privacy Moves West 196 Conclusion 237 Notes 253 Bibliography 289 Index 309 Drawing on a wealth of original research, Jessica Lake documents how the advent of photography and cinema drove women--whose images were being taken and circulated without their consent--to court. There they championed the creation of new laws and laid the groundwork for America's commitment to privacy. Vivid and engagingly written, this powerful work will draw scholars and students from a range of fields, including law, women's history, the history of photography, and cinema and media studies--back cover The advent of the photographic and cinematic camera in the mid to late 19th century caused new harms to individuals (particularly women), which existing laws (copyright, defamation, trespass) were inadequate to address. This work demonstrates that women forged a 'right to privacy' in the United States by bringing lawsuits claiming control and ownership over filmed images (still and moving) of their faces, bodies and narratives