Deborah Cohen

[2][note 1] Cohen is of Ukrainian Jewish descent and grew up the daughter of a lawyer in Louisville, Kentucky.

[3] She graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1990, and completed her Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Berkeley in 1996.

[5] Cohen's first book was The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (University of California Press, 2001).

Her themes include the descent of popular tastes from the individuality of the Victorians into mass conformity, and (triggered by the 1895 libel and indecency trials of Oscar Wilde) a perceived linkage between aesthetic taste and homosexuality that led British men to retreat from home decor, leaving it to women.

Cohen studies the way that the balance between privacy and secrecy has been transformed by developments including the enforced openness of mid-19th-century divorce courts, the early 20th-century legalization of adoption and abortion, and the changing sizes and composition of family units.