Men's Leisure Research Articles

Sport, time, and society: the British at play

In Britain's history, work and leisure have always been yoked together. Until the Reformation, the working year was peppered with Saint's days and ancient pre-Christian festivals. No puritan ethic of godly work could dent the British addiction to pleasure, and even when the Industrial Revolution broke the old cycle, workers created their own festivals. Employers and moralists came to accept the need for leisure, but they preferred the chaotic, often anarchic quality of traditional pastimes which were closely linked to drunkenness and immorality. Organized sport provided spectacle, discipline and orderly participation, a perfect means of controlling men's leisure time as industrial society dominated their working hours. The control of women was achieved by other less subtle means. What began as a means of control became a source of true pleasure and delight for working men: a liberation from daily life, replete with heroes and passionate loyalties. Dennis Brailsford traces the rise and transformation of organized sport, its impact upon social patterns and gender roles, and suggests that today sport is recreating some of the social ills it was first designed to cure more than a century ago.

Women's life and leisure in an Australian rural community

In this paper it is shown that men living in an Australian rural community use their superior power to exclude women from much of their work and leisure activity. The activities examined include organized sport, drinking, friendship and service club activity. Women are expected to use their domestic skills both privately and publicly to facilitate men's pursuit of glory and community status and to applaud their achievements. The study confirms the research of Deem, Green, Woodward, Hebron, Dixey and Talbot in showing that men's leisure is often achieved at the expense of women's. In the second part of the paper the sources of men's ability to exclude and oppress women are examined. Their superior power is related to their advantageous position in the market labour force, women's economic dependence and a community belief system which stereotypes women as inferior, advocates that women's proper place is in the home, and argues that men are entitled to greater freedom than women to pursue their own leisure ...

Women's Leisure, Men's Leisure: A Study in Subordination and Exploitation

In this paper findings from an Australian rural community study are presented which show that men dominate local recreational resources and activities and often deliberately exclude women from them. Notwithstanding this treatment women are expected to use their domestic skills to facilitate men's leisure and to be present to cheer men on in their pursuit of personal glory and public esteem. As a rule men do not reciprocate. Women's own leisure in both the home and the public sphere is reduced by their incorporation in men's leisure and by their far greater responsibilities under the prevailing domestic division of labour. Often men do not have to move openly and directly against women because the process of domination and exclusion are facilitated by their inheritance of leisure space, historical precedent, and a gender specific ideology that portrays existing inequitable arrangements as natural and proper. It is shown that relationships are so one-sided and the control of resources for recreation so asymmetrical to warrant describing the situation as exploitative.

THE RATIONAL SUBORDINATION OF WOMEN'S LEISURE UNDER PATRIARCHAL CAPITALISM

ABSTRACT This paper advances the particular interpretation that the rationalization of both work and social life under industrialization throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century has had profound consequences for the leisure or women. Just as women have traditionally played a secondary role in the work force, it was “rational” that their leisure should also be secondary to men's leisure. In industrial capitalism women have less leisure space and time than do men. Also, the quality of women's leisure experience is often inferior to that of men's in that “women's work is never done”. Moreover, in the patriarchal society of Western capitalism men can be seen to have restricted the participation of wives and daughters in public leisure. Working class women may be seen to face a double burden under patriarchal capitalism as they experience both capitalist exploitation and patriarchal subordination. As a result, working class women would seem to constitute a most disadvantaged group with respect ...

Women and Leisure in Feminist Fiction

Leisure–defined as a state of mind characterized by feelings of freedom, pleasure, and growth–is employed as a vehicle for examining changing women's roles in feminist fiction. Such fiction suggests that many women experience a dearth of leisure in the traditional roles of wife, homemaker, and mother. Women who assume these roles more often view their lives as dominated by antileisure, that is, by activity undertaken compulsively, as a means to an end, and from a perception of necessity. In the novels chosen for consideration, a pattern emerges. The sequence of getting married, making a home, and having children means an increasing abridgement of leisure for women, while this same sequence results in an increasing realization of leisure for men. The recurring theme in this literature is that women, like men, have compelling leisure needs which may take them beyond the bounds of homemaking and child-rearing.