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When touring the ‘cottages’ in Newport, Rhode Island (vacation homes of the super-wealthy built during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), some of the tour guides explained the separate bedrooms by pointing out the sitting room that was part of the lady’s room. It was apparently customary for her to receive friends and casual visitors in her bedroom, which would have been awkward if her husband also needed to dress in there (in an era when they might have changed clothes 3-5 times daily). Probably the idea of using it as a visiting room came after people began to use separate bedrooms, but it would have reinforced it.
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Together those are, I think, the actual explanation.
What needs to be remembered is that the idea of separate bedrooms dates back centuries before this, back to a time when, even in the largest households, important people lived in single chambers, taking most of their meals and receiving visitors in the same room in which they slept. The original significance of the separation was therefore more about how they used those rooms during the day, not what they did at night.
My wife and I sleep in the same bed. Just thought I’d mention that since everybody else in the thread is weighing in on their separate bed arrangements. Just sayin…
Thanks. It seems the official answer to “did it come from tightening rope beds” is “Maybe, maybe not”. Bedbugs were definitely very real critters (or a very real extremely wide variety of possible critters) but probably even moreso when mattresses were stuffed with straw and moss and other “good eatin’” for all manner of insects and dogs and cats in a land before flea & tic dips slept in the house.
The phrase “You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar” is also literal from when people used to keep dishes of water or glass flytraps (like-these if you were fancier; my aunts made them out of plastic milk jugs). They’re simple but effective devices were kept in kitchens and dining rooms to distract flies from the food; there’s a hole in the bottom into which the fly can get to a tiny amount of bait and once in they have difficulty getting out. Proper manners dictated that the device be covered with a napkin when company came so they wouldn’t have to see dead flies. to attract flies away from the food. I’m not sure if honey really works better than vinegar, but my understanding is you can catch more flies with a scrap of meat or just water than you can with honey or vinegar.
Getting back to the OP, I’ve seen floorplans of older (18th-19th century) for which there was a spare room connected to the master bedroom suite that was referred to as a “snoring room.”
Since this thread has been resurrected, I wanted to help clear up this misconception. According to current standards, the Victorians were in some ways prudish, but they were amazingly pragmatic in certain ways as well. I’ve read a fair bit about prostitution in the Old West, and in many places, the Victorian-era authorities managed the feat of simultaneously outlawing and regulating prostitution.
Some towns confined brothels to certain areas by varying fines–for example, the fine might be $5 north of Main Street and $20 south of Main Street. It was also quite common for towns to require that all prostitutes be examined by a doctor at regular intervals.
For further reading, I highly recommend Brothels, Bordellos, and Bad Girls: Prostitution in Colorado, 1860-1930 by Jan Mackell.
As for beds being shorter long ago because people were shorter - this is most likely not true. 18th century beds were made individually, there was not standard size. So yes some were shorter some were longer. The average height of white male soldiers during the Rev. War was about 2/3 of an inch different than army men of the 1950’s. So you have to measure the bed to be sure. Often a fluffy feather mattress or high bedposts make it appear shorter than it really is and it is more of an optical illusion. I work in an historic house and have found this to be true with our beds. One you could not fit a standard mattress in - it is short, the others are not.
I love it when we go to hotels on vacation because the room usually has two beds in it. Slim and Hubs take one bed and I have the other one all to my freaking self..no husband or kid kicking me in the back/stomach all night, nobody breathing in my face or leaning over me going “Are you asleep yet?”. It’s fab.
I’ll check that book out, thanks. It’s a subject that interests me.
The U.S. government regulated prostitution in Tennessee during the Civil War. They were losing too many men to STDs (not necessarily death [though that was more than possible] but too disabled to fight) as well as the non fatal but just general nastiness and irritation of crab lice and other low level problems, as well as soldiers being rolled or beaten by pimps (possibly the prostitutes themselves) for their pay, etc.. They deported all of the prostitutes from Memphis on the west end of the state and Chattanooga on the other end and before they could come back they required them to buy a license and be regularly examined (at their own expense by a military approved medical professional) and to confine their trade to certain areas of town and to brothels that were inspected periodically for cleanliness. The fees that were paid financed the administrative cost and the result was greatly diminished rates of new infections.
The postbellum city of Birmingham, Alabama evolved from hills and dales and tiny crossroads communities to the largest city in the state [which it has remained ever since] in just a matter of a few years. It also had technically illegal but heavily regulated prostitution for most of the late 19th/early 20th century, which also worked well. Their most famous madam was Louise Wooster, herself a former Civil War prostitute (for which side varies with the telling) who was beloved even by some church goers for remaining behind, along with her girls, to nurse those too sick to be moved during two epidemics (cholera and yellow fever) that depopulated the city (from evacuation) during the 1870s; there were prominent citizens who literally owed their lives to her. She became very rich by investing her considerable pleasure earnings in the booming real estate market and steel industry, managed the money of/provided pensions for her ladies, took lots of care for discretion (including secret entrances to her establishments- she had several, divided by price range), and was generally beloved. She left most of her fortune to charity, and the “look the other way” prostitution in the city didn’t survive her by very long. (It continued to exist of course, you just weren’t as likely to see a policeman at a brothel in his uniform or a steel executive walking out of one in daylight.)
She is rumored to be the inspiration for Belle Watling but then so are about 900 other people.
I’ve heard the room off the master bedroom was usually the nursery. Unless there is dedicated childcare help, Mom is the one who gets up with the infant because she is the one with the milk supply. Eventually, it became easier to just put a small cot in the nursery, because Mom would be getting up and down all night long. (Especially if she had one like my daughter–the kid didn’t sleep for the first year of her life!)
Infant mortality was high, and babies were vulnerable to every bug floating around the neighborhood. If you have a kid with a belly virus you’ll be taking care of that kid round the clock, to clean up the poopy diapers and throw up. Gastroenteritis killed a lot of babies, too.
Women of yore suffered a lot of “women’s diseases,” which were usually complications of childbirth. A mother who is caring for a sick infant and who has miseries still existing from birthing that kid is NOT going to be interested in possibly having another baby in nine months.
Then you add the snoring, the hot vs cold debate, and other controversies of the marital bed…I believe there were a LOT of reasons for separate bedrooms!
~VOW
I am amazed and surprised by how many posters here are confusing the idea of sleeping in separate rooms with the idea of sleeping in separate beds. This one - #2 at the very beginning - is a great example:
The comfort of having a bed to oneself, and the other person not hogging the covers, are easily solved by having separate beds in the same room. The problems of farts and lights can be solved somewhat if the beds are some distance apart, and are solved totally by having separate rooms.
In Robert Morgan’s biography of Daniel Boone this is mentioned. The explanation given there was that in one room cabins the social convention was to ignore it. You might hear the sounds of sex but everyone just pretended they didn’t hear.
My grandfather was from a family of 15 children (all of whom lived to adulthood) and usually with some cousins or other relatives staying over as well. Their house wasn’t one room but it wasn’t large, and when my sister asked “What did you do if you wanted privacy?” he answered “You closed your eyes and pretended nobody else was there”.
As an oddity… his parents slept in separate bedrooms, though there was a connecting doorway. His mother slept in the original front bedroom of the house but later the part of the front porch outside of her room was enclosed to build what’s called a “shed room”, a really simple ‘house expander’ that was common in farmhouses when families grew. (The two rooms at the front of this houseare shed rooms.)
Maybe the lack of king sized beds in bygone times has something to do with it? All the beds I’ve seen from the 30s and 40s were double-bed sized at best and some were smaller. My DH and I share a king sized bed and at times I still leave it to go toss and turn by myself. I could never ever have slept with another person in a double bed.
It’s fab.
