Fainting couches.
Were they really manufactured for fainters? How often were people (most likely women, right) fainting that they necessitated a dedicated piece of furniture?
Assuming women weren't having constant syncopal episodes in the parlor, how did we get the name for fainting couches? What does that tell us about household design, wealth display based on manufactured goods, and even perceptions/lived experience of women's health and frailty?
Thanks in advance!
The technical term for a fainting couch is actually chaise longue - a long chair, because physically it has the shape of a chair with a really long seat more than the shape of a couch, which implies a back on the long side and two arms on the short ones. If you look at nineteenth century sources, particularly fiction, they will often refer to a character "falling half-fainting on a couch," but there's no indication that this is a chaise longue rather than a sofa. The term "fainting couch" doesn't appear until the 1960s, where it's pretty much always used either along with "Victorian" or other descriptors that are clearly meant to evoke Victorianism (e.g. shadowboxes with human-hair wreaths). So I think I have two past answers that combine to explain: