Moral Order and Moral Ordering in Public Advice about American Children’s Rooms, 1876-1909

Abstract

The study is an initial, preliminary effort toward examining the development of children’s domestic spaces in US American middle class culture, focusing particularly on the years 1876 to 1909. The inquiry centers on how writers of public advice in newspapers and magazines understood and framed the contents, purpose and context of “children’s rooms” as a way of assessing how the child’s room arose as a cultural object to be negotiated and shaped through moral discourses about childhood and training. It is argued that the materiality of the child’s room, especially that designated for the girl, stood in tension with classed based notions of taste and character that parents and advice givers attempted to impart.

Keywords

• child’s room
• gender role
• education
• conference
• moralism
• history