Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Together and Apart: Domestic Hygiene and Modern Marriage, 1890-1945
AU - Hinds, Hilary
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - This article examines the advent of twin beds as a common sleeping arrangement for English couples. Through an analysis of a range of sources from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries—marketing materials, advertisements, domestic, decorative and marital advice books and novels and films—it argues that while twin beds were initially recommended by proponents of the domestic sanitation movement as part of a raft of hygiene measures, by the 1920s they had become a fashionable item of bedroom furniture for modern couples in ‘companionate’ marriages. It was in this context that Marie Stopes, in her popular marital advice books, railed against them as an ‘invention of the devil’, symptomatic of the evils of modernity, and endangering the happiness of the modern married couple. The article concludes that, despite these changing contexts of consumption, the significance of the history of twin beds needs to be understood through the intersecting discourses of domesticity, health and sexuality.
AB - This article examines the advent of twin beds as a common sleeping arrangement for English couples. Through an analysis of a range of sources from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries—marketing materials, advertisements, domestic, decorative and marital advice books and novels and films—it argues that while twin beds were initially recommended by proponents of the domestic sanitation movement as part of a raft of hygiene measures, by the 1920s they had become a fashionable item of bedroom furniture for modern couples in ‘companionate’ marriages. It was in this context that Marie Stopes, in her popular marital advice books, railed against them as an ‘invention of the devil’, symptomatic of the evils of modernity, and endangering the happiness of the modern married couple. The article concludes that, despite these changing contexts of consumption, the significance of the history of twin beds needs to be understood through the intersecting discourses of domesticity, health and sexuality.
KW - bedrooms
KW - furniture
KW - health
KW - marriage
KW - modernity
KW - sexuality
U2 - 10.1093/jdh/epq022
DO - 10.1093/jdh/epq022
M3 - Journal article
VL - 23
SP - 275
EP - 304
JO - Journal of Design History
JF - Journal of Design History
SN - 0952-4649
IS - 3
ER -