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The Politics of Women's Leisure

Leisure is an aspect of women's lives which has been greatly neglected, not only by male leisure studies researchers, but also and more surprisingly, by feminists too. The latter neglect has only been partly because leisure is considered by many feminists to be a male concept, developed in relation to analyses of the working class and their non-work time, and with a history closely tied to the hours worked by men in paid employment (Chambers, 1985). Additionally feminist writers have been centrally preoccupied with analysing the structures and ideological forces shaping women's oppression rather than with considering some of the less overt consequences of that oppression. As anyone who has ever tried to research women's leisure will confirm, what is most obvious is the apparent absence of leisure as a significant force in the lives of many women. Hence the political significance of examining both what leisure women have and why they have so little has escaped attention. It is the intention of this article to go some way towards remedying this omission by considering the political importance of women's leisure (including its absence) and by exploring the social, political and economic factors which underlie the politics of that leisure. In tracing the history of feminist theory in the contemporary period, Eisenstein (1984) points to the political nature of that theory and its roots in not only liberal theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also in the traditions of socialist and utopian theory of the nineteenth century and in the nineteenthand early twentieth-century exploration of the social context of sexuality. Feminism and feminist theory are not just abstract analyses of the subordination of women by men, but contain a political commitment to changing women's position in the world