Category: Courtship

• Automobile as a Bedroom on Wheels

  The Automobile as a Bedroom on Wheels theory was a moral panic that treated the enclosed car not as a neutral transportation device but as a deliberately corrupting machine designed to remove young people from parental supervision and facilitate pre-marital sexuality. In the 1920s, critics sometimes called the automobile the “devil wagon,” arguing that its mobility, privacy, rumble seats, and nighttime use made it the ideal setting for unsupervised intimacy. The strongest version of the theory claimed that the car industry did not merely profit from these social effects but knowingly built a rolling temptation chamber that would weaken courtship customs, parental authority, and religious morality. Because the automobile genuinely transformed dating culture and private youth mobility, the rumor attached itself to a real technological and social shift.