Get Out of My Room

In Get Out of My Room, Jason Reid traces the history of the teenage bedroom, charting how and why it emerged, and what its meaning has been to generations of Americans. He uncovers the ideological, demographic, economic, and psychological trends which fostered this use of domestic space, and ably demonstrates the role the bedroom has played in American adolescents’ lives as well as in literature, music, and film. He turns first to the nineteenth century, when the idea of separate bedrooms for young people began to spread among middle-class families, who envisioned such spaces as offering opportunities for solitude, religious reverie, and character development. While some families indeed began to create these chambers for their young, according to Reid, the idea caught on somewhat slowly. Indeed, he has unearthed stories which depicted children regarding a room of their own with dread rather than delight, for they did not welcome separation from siblings. By the end of the century, however, the idea gained greater traction, and more middle-class families began to offer their children their own spaces, when and if they could afford them. Reid points out that the bedroom was seen as feminine space, since girls were expected to be more domestic than boys. Boys were expected to live their lives outside of the home, and hence the bedroom supposedly had less relevance to their development.

Aesthetics · Art · Bedroom · Meaning (existential) · Middle class · Political science · Relevance (law) · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Children's Rights and Participation · Gender Studies · History · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Psychology