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Get Out of My Room! A History of Teen Bedrooms in America

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 104; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jax491

1945-2314

Sarah E. Chinn,

Diverse Education Studies and Reforms

In 1982 I was fourteen years old, and the British synthpop duo Yazoo's Upstairs at Eric's (1982) was continually rotating on my record player. Buried deep on side 1 of the album was a quirky gem, “In My Room.” The lyrics spoke to the paradoxical status of my teenage bedroom, a site of both refuge and isolation: “And in the room locked up inside me / The cutout magazines remind me / I sit and wait alone in my room.” As it turns out, my relationship to my bedroom was like that of millions of other teenagers. And though it seemed both natural and inevitable, the centrality of the room of one's own to young people growing up during the Cold War was a comparatively new phenomenon, made possible by a congeries of forces: an affluent bourgeoisie, the combined voices of child-development experts and advice columnists, access to inexpensive and portable electronics, and the concretizing of teenage identity. After almost a century of debates over the appropriateness of separate sleeping quarters for adolescents, by the 1950s the teen bedroom was a permanent (and for parents and teens alike, regarded as necessary) feature of the American home.