Abstract
The right to privacy runs through American history as a constant theme, from the circumstances leading to the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution to the legal reasoning in Roe v. Wade. American expectations of privacy are not innate. Not every human culture has the same expectations of personal privacy nor are expectations of privacy constant across social class and ethnicity. Ideas about personal privacy are cultural, learned, so there is a social history of this idea. Reid’s book contributes to the history of this idea by tracing the rise of the idea of “the autonomous teen bedroom” in American culture.
Writing this history Reid faces a problem of evidence that historians of childhood and youth almost always face, namely, that young people leave relatively little evidence of their everyday lives. Social historians rely, understandably, on written and visual and sometimes material evidence. The history of childhood and adolescence, therefore, usually amounts to a history of adult ideas about youth.
Reid’s history relies primarily on printed materials, from advice manuals for parents to magazines and newspapers, to professional publications. He also musters evidence from mass-mediated (popular) culture including films, television, and music. Wholly cognizant of the need to hear from the teens themselves, aged ten to twenty, Reid ferrets out whatever testimony he can, including teen diaries, letters to popular magazines, adult memoirs of adolescence, and a small sample of correspondence from adults recollecting their childhood rooms. The one sort of evidence he neglects is visual evidence of teen bedrooms by teens themselves, by which I mean vernacular photography or snapshots. Finding that evidence is a substantial task that Reid decided (perhaps wisely) not to undertake. There is a very interesting book of photographs of teens in their bedrooms, My Room (Chronicle Books, 1995) by Adrienne Salinger, but while that book has large color photographs and direct testimony from each teen in his or her room, the pictures and texts beg for a scholarly analysis that is missing.
Reid’s master narrative is familiar to historians of the family. The nineteenth-century ideas about separate bedrooms for youth stressed evangelical ideas about character and purity. The turning point in these ideas, argues Reid, was around 1900, by which time scientific advice (from the new science of psychology) replaced religion as the source of advice on how to raise children. The turn of the century also saw the emergence of a new stage of consumer capitalism, so while the experts in psychology offered advice (in books, magazines, and newspapers) to parents on teen bedrooms, both their design and patterns of teen and parental behavior involving those bedrooms, the popular, mass-mediated, commercial culture was viewing the teen bedroom as a site of identity construction through the consumptions of commodity goods.
The luxury of a separate bedroom for the family teenager required some level of affluence, and Reid is well aware of the fact that much of the history he unfolds here is the history of middle-class families and middlebrow decorating tastes. Left to themselves, teens in the last half of the twentieth century have relied on images from popular culture (e.g., posters of bands or movie stars). By the 1960s, the notions of autonomy and emancipation from rules created the teens’ expectation of privacy, resulting in the iconic “Keep Out!” sign on the bedroom door and the increasing teen expectation that a family member will knock the door before entering. Behind the closed door, teens constructed a world expressing their self-image, including music, posters, and, in some cases, televisions and game consoles and telephones.
A familiar idea running through Reid’s history is “moral panic,” the historians’ phrase describing adults’ perceptions of threats to children and youth, from the dime novels of the late nineteenth century to comic books to violent video games in the twenty-first century. With so many dangers (more imagined than real, historians are quick to note) threating teens, the adults concluded that close surveillance of the teens, their “containment” at home, was one way to keep them safe. One source of moral panic, of course, was adolescent sexuality, so the advice literature often addressed parental worries about masturbation and even sex behind the closed doors of teen bedrooms. The music and violent video games prompted additional moral panic, as did the rise in teen use of alcohol and other drugs. By the 1970s and 1980s, parents could add mental illness, eating disorders, and even suicide to the list of worries about the lives teen create for themselves behind closed doors. Still, adult moral panics were not about to reverse the increasing expectations by teens that they had a “right” to privacy in their own personal space.
Reid announces in his “Introduction” that his twin goals in this book are discovering the origins of the idea of the autonomous teen bedroom in the United States and accounting for what brought about that emergence. In some ways, the answers to both questions are not surprising—many other social historians of youth and the family have pretty much chronicled the same trajectory and identified the same forces (e.g., increasing affluence in the middle class, technological advances in heating and cooling homes, the history of ideas in developmental psychology, changing norms about gender, moral panics about the safety, and morality of youth) at work in fashioning both the idea of the autonomous teen bedroom and the details of the design and customary use of those bedrooms. Reid is to be commended for a more exhaustive search for evidence, both direct and indirect, than found in most other histories.
As noted, Reid attempts to find the voices of the teens themselves to keep this from being simply a history of adult ideas about teen bedrooms, collecting testimony past and present from various sources. What is missing, as noted here also, is the absence of any use of visual evidence created by the teens themselves. Also absent is any work from the vibrant field of children’s folklore studies, which could fill in some interesting details about the actual use of their bedrooms by teens, such as slumber parties. Reid’s book is a solid piece of social history, but we have a long way to go before we see this history from the viewpoint of the teens themselves.