A fainting room was a private room, common in the Victorian era, which typically contained . Such couches or sofas typically had an arm on one side only to permit easy access to a reclining position, similar to its cousin the chaise longue, although the sofa style most typically featured a back at one end (usually the side with the arm) so that the resulting position was not purely supine position.
There are also accounts that mention fainting rooms in eighteenth-century America.
These rooms, which were also referred to as bedrooms (bedrooms were called chambers), were located in the ground floor and contained a daybed that allowed occupants to rest for brief periods during the day.
One book associates Victorian fainting rooms with a claim that they are meant to force women to remain indoors and inactive under the guise of ensuring privacy and class, and are yet another example of how woman were seen as femme fragile, at the time.
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