Many names for the rooms of a house are perfectly simple and self-explanatory, like “dining room” and “bedroom,” while others, no less clear in meaning, have something to tell us about the complicated history of humans and their habitations.  Attics are so named from the space at the top of an ancient Greek building, a space often enclosed by a façade with columns in the Attic order.  The English “drawing-room” was originally “withdrawing room,” that is, a smaller chamber adjacent to a grander one, where company might be received (see episodes of Downton Abbey, passim) or to which the ladies could withdraw toward the end of a formal dinner, leaving the gentlemen to their brandy and cigars.   A “pantry,” should you be lucky enough to have such a thing in your house, is where you keep glasses, cutlery, the soup tureen given you as a wedding gift and seldom used, or perhaps canned goods; formerly it was a storeroom for bread (French pain).  A “mudroom” in a New England house, floored in tile, equipped with hooks for your coats and a bench for you to sit on while you take off your muddy boots, speaks volumes about what spring is like in that part of the world.  

Meanwhile, “den” brings with it a whole history of civilization, from “animal lair” to “a place of retreat” or “secret lurking place of thieves” (OED), then to “small confined room,” especially one “unfit for human habitation” (OED again), and finally to what it generally means in this country, a cozy room with Barcalounger, perhaps books, certainly big-screen television.  Beyond that, a cultural-studies dissertation might be written, probably has been written, about the semantic shift from “den” to “mancave.”

No name is more interesting than “boudoir,” however.  Witold Rybczynski’s wonderful 1986 book Home: A Short History of an Idea traces the advent of the room to the French eighteenth century, when builders started providing the lady of the house with a “part dressing room, part sitting room,” a place “where special intimates could be received.” Boudoirs responded to the era’s new liking for privacy, and beyond that to a lady’s need for a space peculiarly her own, where she could arrange furniture and décor to her liking, write letters or diary entries, drink chocolate.  The phrase “intimates could be received” hints at the meaning “boudoir” has developed since the eighteenth century: a room where a lady appears fetchingly en déshabillé and ready for sexual intimacies. This is the meaning implied when the “Guy Noir” sequence comes on in Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, with its theme song praising the private eye: “He’s smooth, he’s cool, he’s fast with a gun, / A master in the boudoir . . .”

What Rybczynski fails to mention in Home is the origin of the word “boudoir.”  It means a “place to sulk in,” from the French verb bouder, to pout or sulk. It’s hard to know what to make of this.  Does it embody a sexist assumption, the notion that if a woman wants to go off to a room of her own, depriving herself of masculine company, it could only be that she’s in a bad, sulky mood?  Possibly.  Certainly the origin of the word makes some kind of value judgment about women and their spaces. The nineteenth-century English author Charles Kingsley renders that judgment explicitly (and condescendingly) in his novel Yeast, where we encounter this description of a willful, ultra-feminine, given-to-moods female character:

But what was Argemone doing all this time? Argemone was busy in her boudoir (too often a true boudoir to her) among books and statuettes, and dried flowers, fancying herself, and not unfairly, very intellectual.

Note the careful italics for the second “boudoir.”  Clearly, Kingsley knew it was a French word and what that word originally meant.