’Women's Leisure? What Leisure?’: Has it always been like this?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to offer some historical context to research that documents the sense of a lack of entitlement to leisure that middle‐class white women have and to the many studies that have identified a lack of leisure opportunity in the lives of women burdened with domestic responsibilities. The data for this research was collected from letters, diaries and other documents written by women and men of colonial New South Wales. Evidence is presented that suggests both genteel (middle‐class) and plebeian (working‐class) women of the early colonial period in New South Wales had relatively good access to leisure, but that this access appears to have been somewhat eroded over the ensuing decades of the Victorian era with the rise of evangelical values and the so‐called ‘domestic revolution’. These findings demonstrate that a lack of leisure is not endemic to the condition of womanhood. The contemporary ‘problem’ of middle‐class white women's leisure in Australia has roots in the Industrial and French revolutions and the Protestant work ethic. Each played a part in reshaping middle‐class ideals of femininity in Britain that were transported in good order to Australia in the Victorian era. Despite two significant waves of feminism and numerous strategies used by women collectively and individually to enlarge their leisure space, the ‘problem’ which emerged in the mid‐nineteenth century is still visible in the twenty‐first century.