Subversive Possibilities: An exploration of women's leisure resistance using historical case studies

Abstract

Using case studies from nineteenth‐century Australia and eighteenth‐ century England this paper explores women's use of leisure spaces to resist oppression. The first case study examines the phenomenon of middleclass women in colonial Australia in the context of the genteel and sometimes subversive leisure activities of letter writing and keeping journals. The refractory leisure behaviours and attitudes of many of the convict women transported from Britain to New South Wales in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provides the material for the second case study. Working women of eighteenth‐century England's insistence on continuing the practice of social tea drinking is the subject of the third case study. The case studies provide evidence of women's agency through leisure spaces to resist, negotiate, contest and sometimes transform their access to leisure at an individual and a community level.