Time, work and leisure

Abstract

This book provides the first history of how we have imagined and used time since 1700. It traces the history of the relationship between work and leisure, from the ‘leisure preference’ of male workers in the eighteenth century, through the increase in working hours in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to their progressive decline from 1830 to 1970. It examines how trade union action was critical in achieving the decline; how class structured the experience of leisure; how male identity was shaped by both work and leisure; how, in a society that placed high value on work, a ‘leisured class’ was nevertheless at the apex of political and social power – until it became thought of as ‘the idle rich’. Coinciding with the decline in working hours, two further tranches of time were marked out as properly without work: childhood and retirement. By the mid-twentieth century married men had achieved a work- leisure balance. In the 1960s and 1970s it was argued that leisure time would increase at a rapid rate. This false prediction coincided with the entry of married women into the labour market and a halt to the decline in working hours and in sectors of the economy a reversal of it. These two developments radically changed the experience of time and thinking about it. Time became equated with achieving a ‘work-life balance’ where ‘life’ was often unpaid childcare and domestic work.