Three generations of women's leisure: Changes, challenges and continuities

Abstract

This paper examines the leisure lives of twelve women, from four families, across three generations. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews with ‘trios’ of three generations of women, I examine changes and shifts in women's leisure across the life-course and within families. At the outset of the research I was interested primarily in identifying changes, but soon the data revealed that the women transmitted both habits and understanding of leisure down the generations. An important question for gender studies is if women transmit leisure values and practices across generations does this mean that women's leisure lives remain unchanged since early feminist leisure theory? The challenges for the participants of this study were to achieve some autonomy and change in their leisure patterns, even though they demonstrated that many of those patterns remained extremely similar.