Figure 1.--

Modern American children often have their own rooms or at least brothers and sisters each separated in different rooms. Ceratinly the desire of every teenager is to have his own room. Sleeping arrangements have varied greatly over time, in general reflecting the rising affluence of American and European life. This is somewhat different in Japan where housing and thus living space is enormously expensive. Likewise bed clothes have also changed iver time from the once universal nightdress or gown to today's modern pajamas.

Country Sleeping Arrangements

Sleeping arrangements have vaired over time and among countries.

Aincient civilizations

For ancient Athens, look at Lysias's first oration, On the Murder of Eratosthenes. In this speech, the speaker is defending himself from a charge of murder: he had killed Eratosthenes after catching him in bed, in the act (so to speak) with his (the speaker's) wife. In Athenian law, it was justifiable to kill an adulterer. The speaker is careful to explain how his wife started sneaking around behind his back. One of the things he mentions is that he offered to switch beds with his wife (women normally slept in a loft-like upper storey; men slept downstairs) so that she could take care of their infant in the middle of the night more conveniently. Here's a translation of the relevant passage from the Perseus website--

Now in the first place I must tell you, sirs (for I am obliged to give you these particulars), my dwelling is on two floors, the upper being equal in space to the lower, with the women's quarters above and the men's below. When the child was born to us, its mother suckled it; and in order that, each time that it had to be washed, she might avoid the risk of descending by the stairs, I used to live above, and the women below. By this time it had become such an habitual thing that my wife would often leave me and go down to sleep with the child, so as to be able to give it the breast and stop its crying. Things went on in this way for a long time, and I never suspected, but was simple-minded enough to suppose that my own was the chastest wife in the city.

America

You will find fragments of information on small children's sleeping arrangements and advice on the subject--though hardly the basis for an interview--in John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford, 1970), 132, and David Macleod, The Age of the Child:Children in America, 1890-1920 (New York: Twayne, 1998), 20, 50-51, 53-54.

Another useful source is Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Childhood, 1600-1900 (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1992); idem, "Children in the House, 1890 to 1930," and Elizabeth Collins Cromley, "A History of American Beds and Bedrooms, 1890-1930," both in American Home Life, 1880-1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services, ed. Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1992).

Laura Ingalls Wilder describes sleeping arrangements in a pioneer family on the western frontier in the late 19th century. She describes straw beds.

France

Emile Zola wrote about beds and sleeping arrangements in some of his novels.

Germany

One German scholar completing her dissertation on schools in the postwar Soviet Occupied Zone period in Germany (1945-1949) contrin\buted the following information to a discussion of family sleeping arrangements: A large part of my sources come from pupils' essays. In places like Berlin, where the bombing damage was very heavy, housing in general and beds especially were at a premium. Contemporary teachers' and observers' questions often focused on how many children per bed, or if they even had a bed. Sociologists also reported that parents kept their children in bed during the daytime to try and keep them warm during the terrible winters of 1945 and 1946. This of course kept children from getting necessary exercise (and some daylight), but also helped save calories in near-starvation conditions. Blankets were often not available, so children slept in their clothes. And in many apartments, beds even migrated to the kitchen, which often had the only source of heat. Sometimes the whole family slept in the same room; this of course caused huge family tensions with everyone piled on top of each other. It also concretely symbolized the chaotic nature of the postwar period--one person per bed meant a return to "normalization." You need to read German, but the sociological study by Hilde Thurnwald (Berliner Familien, I think) from that period has some good information on sleeping arrangements. Some of the pupils' essays have been published by Annett Groeschner in Ich schlug meiner Mutter die brennenden Funken ab," although I think the majority of ones with references to beds are in the archive (Landesarchiv in Berlin, probably out of your way).

Ireland

The aclaimed memoir by Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes has bed scenes revealing information on sleeping arrangements, in this case for a poor Irish family. Of course the book provides a much fuller account of Irish boyhood, in a poor family. "When I look back," he writes, "on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, had no money to feed the children since Frank's father Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Perhaps it is a story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing shoes repaired with tires, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner, and searching the pubs for his father, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors -- yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.

Italy

No information on the Italian bedroom available at this time.

Bed Clothing

Bed clothes have also changed over time from the once universal nightdress or gown to today's modern pajamas. I'm not sure at thuis time when pajamas first bef\came commonly worn. I think after World War I in the 1920s, but this needs to be pursued.

Created: July 7, 2000
Last updated: July 7, 2000