Sleeping Arrangements

Sleeping arrangements changed in the Age of Revolutions, as beds became lighter in structure, less enclosed, and, supposedly, more hygienic, and were covered in washable bedding. The spaces of sleep altered too, as beds moved upstairs and into specialized rooms and co-sleeping declined. New notions of privacy are often identified as the cause of these shifts in behavior, where the middle classes sought to demarcate the private from the public. Meanwhile, a rethinking, even a pathologization, of bodily intimacy as a moral, sexual, and social contaminant, and source of ill-health and disease, led elite social groups to impose distance between unrelated and related individuals during sleep and to police the dormant bodies of other social and racialized groups.