Teen Bedrooms as Sites of Self-Actualization and Containment

Teen Bedrooms as Sites of Self-Actualization and Containment Mary-Ann Shantz (bio) Reid, Jason. Get Out of My Room! A History of Teen Bedrooms in America. U of Chicago P, 2017. 320 pages. $45.00 hc/e-book. ISBN 9780226409214. In this clearly written and well-argued book, Jason Reid traces the rise in popularity of private bedrooms for American youth. He argues that autonomous teen bedrooms emerged first among urban, middle-class families of the Northeast and Midwestern United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. Seen as especially valuable for adolescent girls, who were expected to spend more time than their male peers in the domestic setting, the private bedroom was promoted as a space facilitating spiritual and emotional development. By the early twentieth century, private bedrooms for teens were being widely promoted by child development experts, but it was not until after the Second World War that they became the norm among middle- and working-class American families. Reid points to a number of variables that facilitated this change: reduced family size and a decline in the practice of taking in boarders and live-in servants; a rising standard of living; greater home ownership; larger homes; and a post-war culture in which “the autonomous teen bedroom became an enshrined part of the postwar suburban consensus” (5). Reid addresses how teens used their bedrooms and what this space meant to them, but much of the book considers how adults envisioned the merits and functions of teen bedrooms. Arguments in favour of giving teens rooms of their own shifted away from “the feminized, God-infused” (39) rationales of the nineteenth century and toward scientific endorsements of “the teen bedroom as a developmental tool” (39) for encouraging academic achievement, peaceful family relationships, domesticity, pride in personal property, and the expression of personal identity. As Reid rightly [End Page 181] notes, “In many respects . . . child development experts were simply offering old wine in new bottles, as the religious arguments of the nineteenth century were replaced by scientific claims—very few of which were actually based on any amount of concrete evidence” (40). Another important theme of the book is the relationship between public and private space: proponents of the private teen bedroom viewed it as “offering teens a safe alternative to urban street culture and commercial amusements” and a means of discouraging teenage delinquency; spending more time in their rooms generally meant teens spent less time in public (9). In eight loosely chronological chapters, Reid explores the roles of teenagers, child development experts, advice columnists, home decor experts, and furniture and electronics manufacturers, as well as that of popular culture, in establishing the autonomous teen bedroom as the new norm. Chapter 1 explores the nineteenth-century arguments young people made in favour of private bedrooms, drawing on the early writings of prominent Americans such as Mary Gove Nichols, Louisa May Alcott, and Theodore Roosevelt, among others. In chapter 2, Reid identifies an emergent consensus among physicians and social scientists in the early twentieth century in favour of private bedrooms for teens, citing child psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall and Leta Hollingworth. Chapter 3 examines the contribution in the interwar years of home decor experts, who often claimed teens should be permitted to play a role in decorating their own rooms. Chapter 4 moves into the post–Second World War period, and here Reid discusses important economic and social developments that put home ownership and private bedrooms for individual family members within reach of many Americans for the first time. At the same time, the advice columnists such as Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren (“Dear Abby”) popularized the views of academic child psychologists and advocated that parents respect teenagers’ privacy and autonomy. In this context, Reid suggests that the teen bedroom was cast as “a key contributor to the [necessary] emancipation process” of maturing adolescents (86). Returning to the subject of room decor in chapter 5, Reid argues that the trend of including teens in the design process in the interwar years led to the displacement of parents entirely in the post-war period, as a strong connection was drawn between teen identity and room decor...

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