Women's Leisure Experiences Research Articles

‘Classy and Never Trashy’: Young Women's Experiences of Nightclubs and the Construction of Gender and Sexuality

This article presents findings from an interpretive study that sought to understand the meanings and experiences of the mainstream nightclub culture from the perspective of young women. Specifically, how the young women's leisure experiences contested, negotiated, constructed and reconstructed feminine ideals and public displays of sexuality were examined as well as the gendered risks that they mitigate throughout this process. Seven young women, between the ages of 19 and 25, participated in the study. The findings call attention to the ways in which the young women created an alternate and desirable self through their appearance and the consumption of alcohol, how they sought male attention and the repercussions of double standards, and how they kept safe through the use of the buddy system and cautionary tales. Emphasis is placed on the highly contradictory nature of the young women's experiences as well as the significance of leisure, friendships, and gender relations.

Care-givers, leisure and meanings of home: a case study of low income women in Dublin

This article seeks to contribute to the literature on the meanings of domestic spaces by furthering understandings of the sorts of roles that space plays in shaping women's leisure experiences. The study researched a group of 15 women who live in disadvantaged areas of Dublin city and care for dependent children. Focus groups and structured conversations revealed the poverty of the spatial capital available to these women, depicting local environments as difficult and stressful, and to be endured rather than enjoyed. They further revealed the extent to which the women's lives were shaped by their obligations as care-givers. Within the home itself, private domestic spaces were found to be deeply embedded with powerful ideologies of motherhood that did not necessarily evaporate in the simple absence of obligations imposed by children. Instead, they tended to serve as constant reminders of how things ‘should be’, consequently constraining some women's abilities to divest themselves of care-giving duties and engage in self-focused recreation. Some of the women studied were able to move beyond obligation, and for them leisure represented modest yet significant opportunities to self-determinedly relax, reclaim and even luxuriate in certain spaces within their homes. Similarly, once relieved of child-caring responsibilities, leisure encounters within the local environment afforded some women new insights into familiar spaces.

Getting Onboard: Women, Access and Serious Leisure

This paper explores women's experiences of accessing serious leisure. It responds to a perceived tendency in contemporary feminist theories of leisure to celebrate women's ability to weave potentially empowering identities from discursive resources in leisure spaces and experiences. While this work creates much needed theoretical space for the exploration of women's agency and self determination within leisure, there is little critical attention given to how women may first negotiate the complexity of their gendered lives to gain access to these sites and experiences. By drawing on the accounts of forty women involved in the Sea Cadet Corps, a form of serious leisure, this paper argues that accessing leisure is still an important aspect of women's leisure experiences. Women cited here engage in active and conscious practices and performances to both justify their access to leisure and to enable their disengagement from demands associated with normative femininity. This paper concludes that to sideline questions of access serves to conceptually dislocate leisure from the wider patterns of women's everyday lives and limits our understanding of how women perceive, use and give meaning to their serious leisure participation.

Leisure and Women's Identity in Late Adolescence: Constraints and Opportunities

Abstract Current research suggests that leisure is yet another site of female subordination. Nevertheless, discourses on leisure which take into account post-structuralist feminist analyses and the spontaneity of the “I” in identity construction, enable leisure to be perceived as a potential site for the construction of identities which resist male definitions and control of feminine identities and make way for individuality in leisure experience for women and in their construction of identity. This paper examines the relationship between leisure experiences and the subjective construction of gender identity for women in late adolescence. A small sample of first year university students who attended two Sydney universities were interviewed. Diaries of leisure activities and experiences were kept for a week. The results show both the constraints of women's leisure experiences in the construction of “feminine” identity, but also the opportunity through leisure to challenge traditional stereotypes and create...

Leisure and Women's Identity: Conformity or Individuality?

Abstract Critical theorists such as Rojek suggest that leisure in capitalist society masks individual oppression rather than contributing to individual identity. This paper argues, however, that such a view incorporates a limited view of identity and ignores aspects of agency such as Mead's “I”. Drawing on Mead's concepts of “I” and “me” and poststructural ideas of subjectivity and discourse, the paper examines the relationship between leisure experiences of women and the construction of gender identity in different stages of the life-cycle. It concludes that leisure experiences of women both reinforce traditional oppressive gender identities and also provide a space for challenging them and creating liberating individual identities.

Leisure and the Older Black Woman

Older black women's leisure experiences have not been studied in the past. Their unique point of view comes from diverse social and cultural experiences punctuated by a lifetime of inequities. Their experiences were described in routine terms; they talked about making it through the day. Their losses led to a feeling of loneliness. They found refuge in affiliating with others at the church and senior centers. Church activities and the personal experience of worship provided a context for remaining independent as they aged.

The Sociology of Women's Leisure and Physical Recreation: Constraints and Opportunities

This study of women's leisure experiences is based on a random survey of 700 Sheffield women, supplemented by interviews with groups of women and their men partners. Both women's and men's access to free time and leisure opportunities are structured by similar factors, such as their work and domestic situation, social class and income level, age and ethnic group. However in societies where child care and domestic work are primarily done by women, gender has a major influence on leisure behaviour. Women typically earn lower incomes than men or may be financially dependent, but access to personal spending money is a less significant constraint than prevailing norms about appropriate behaviour for women. These influence perceptions of women's entitlement to time and resources for leisure, and how it may be spent. One third of Sheffield women regularly engage in physical recreation, the same figure as the national average. These women differ from others in predictable respects (for example in terms of age group, marital status and stage in the life course, and household income), and the profile of typical participants varies between sports. Participation in leisure away from home was influenced by dominant ideologies about 'a woman's place', forming the context for negotiations with partners and decisions about appropriate activities, venues and companions, their cost and timing, as well as issues such as transportation and personal safety.