Bed Linen Trade Catalogues: The Material Culture of Sleep and North American Homemaking (1850 and 1930)

Winterthur Museum Short Term Fellowship, Summer 2023

To understand the nature of the modern bed linen usage and its wider cultural contexts, I studied the evolution of the material culture of sleep and homemaking through bed linen trade catalogues in the Winterthur Library collections. Juxtaposing visual representations and texts about linens, beds, and bedrooms in trade catalogues and printed advertising ephemera with swatch books, home decoration manuals, ladies’ and household periodicals, domestic accounts, home sanitation resources, and newspapers offered insights into the content of the modern armoire and the micro-histories of its use. Based on these insights I continue examining the micro-histories through the categories of technological and scientific innovation, distribution systems, rhetoric, and identity, endeavoring to map the history, changes, development, and structures of the manufacture, retail, consumption and use of bed linen. This will inform an analysis of their contribution to practices of homemaking in the context of a developing market economy and the concomitant growth and evolution of consumer desires. Positioning the modern material culture of sleep within larger contexts of American homemaking, including histories of hygiene, consumption, and modern womanhood, will offer insights into the emergence of cultures of sleep today.