What We Did in Bed by Brian Fagan

Author:Brian Fagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300223880
Publisher: Yale University Press

PILLOW TALK

The leveling and vulnerable nature of sleep and the dark meant that bed sharing offered an opportunity to transgress social norms.11 The hierarchical relationship between a master or mistress and their servants could loosen. In his 1836 tell-all The Life and Confession of Isaac Heller, the troubled author, who was later hanged for murdering his family with an axe in Liberty, New York, relates how he was sometimes so scared of the night that he’d seek comfort by sleeping alongside the “black persons” who worked on his farm. In a patriarchal society, women might use the night to express themselves, as John Eliot of Connecticut complains in his 1768 diary. Recalling the bedtime onslaughts of his wife’s so-called curtain lectures, he describes how she kept both of them up through the night with her “raking up the old stories about the first & second wife, first & second children etc.”12

Bed sharing also allowed otherwise forbidden sexual relationships, including between unmarried servants, same-sex individuals, and masters and servants. Mistresses would sometimes share their beds with female servants to protect them from the unwanted advances of male members of the household. Servants often slept at the foot of their masters’ beds, no matter what was happening elsewhere in the bed. The New Englander Abigail Willey of the 1600s would put her children in the center if she was not in the mood for sex.

Yet the night can bring deep bonds of intimacy too. In some European communities unmarried youngsters of the opposite sex were allowed to bed together to judge potential compatibility. In this practice, called bundling, a partition known as a bundling board would be put down the center of the bed and absolutely no sex was allowed. It is still practiced by ultraconservative groups like the Swartzentruber Amish, who allow the couple to bundle but require them to remain fully clothed, engage in no touching, and talk all night.

Bed sharing can bring connection and the fun of freewheeling conversation after dark. Samuel Pepys was a great fan of sleeping with others—not only women but also his platonic friends. In his seventeenth-century diary, whose entries often famously ended with the words “and so to bed,” he ranked his bedfellows according to their conversation skills and behavior in bed. Among his favorite bedmates were the merchant Thomas Hill, who could talk about “most things of a man’s life”; John Brisbane, “a good scholar and sober man”; and “merry” Mr. Creed, who provided “excellent company.”13

Co-sleeping is still commonplace in many societies. The Japanese call it soine, and they value the warm, cozy physical experience and feelings of security (anshinkan) it provides.14 Soine is especially common in families with young children. Anshinkan is best described as safe intimacy and refers in particular to infants sleeping between their parents. Sight, gaze, recognizing familiar faces—all these add to infants’ security and better sleep. Co-sleeping infants touch, suckle, and breathe with their caregivers in a kind of mutual mingling that lasts even after everyone has woken up.

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