The study of women’s leisure offers a telling window into the difficulties women have had and continue to have in finding ‘spare time’. Although women’s perspectives and opportunities have expanded since the eighteenth century to include a whole variety of new activities, the constraints on their leisure remain in place in many cases. In their study of contemporary Britain, Women’s Leisure, What Leisure?, Eileen Green, Sandra Hebron and Diana Woodward outline these constraints. First, ‘even when women do engage in paid work, this is typically seen as secondary to their work within the household or family, so women are not seen to ‘earn’ the right to leisure in the same way as men’, and second, ‘because domesticity and maternity are presented as the source of women’s pleasure, [they] are not supposed to need to seek personal gratification from leisure, and to do so is considered selfish’.129 With these widespread assumptions about women and their responsibilities for family leisure firmly in place, often they face similar prejudices and barriers to pleasurable pastimes that they have faced in the past.
That being noted, women have made amazing strides in all areas of leisure pursuits. Girls and women in Europe now routinely have access to education (in fact more women than men attend university in the twenty-first century), sports, leisure facilities, pubs, media and many other options for pleasure. The recent impact of wireless telephones with messaging features, Internet, e-mail and World Wide Web options as well as other computer programs cannot be underestimated in their effect on women’s leisure in Europe. The world is literally at the fingertips of women through these new technologies, and older leisure forms have now assumed new shapes. E-books allow reading on a computer screen at home, and games can be played on-line. Gambling, shopping, chatting and travelling have now all taken on new dimensions as they exist inside and outside of cyberspace. Even courtship, a popular organiser of young women’s leisure from time immemorial, can now be accomplished on-line. New communities of leisure have emerged with few constraints on time or place.
In a 1998 study of French leisure habits, more than 60 per cent of teen girls who responded said they participated in sports, but that compared to more than 70 per cent of boys in sport. This same data suggests that women’s leisure time has increased at the expense of domestic tasks, and that in fact, rising unemployment among workers and changing values for white-collar employees has led to a rise in leisure time for poorer classes and a loss of such time for the formerly ‘leisured’ classes.130 In Britain, a 1997 survey suggested that although gender differences in leisure have dissipated substantially, there are still markers: women prefer yoga to snooker, few men knit or sew, and many more men than women participate in competitive sport.131
The ‘brave new world’ of late twentieth - and early twenty-first century leisure has created opportunities for women of all classes and nationalities, but somehow the suspicion and politicisation of women’s leisure remains. Women across Europe experience the double bind of waged work and housework, while state provision of daycare is still sparse. Women’s wages continue to lag behind men’s, and women still constitute a larger proportion of the elderly living in poverty. In the realm of leisure, women often continue to facilitate the leisured activities of their family, whether it is driving children to ballet lessons or preparing house and food for a dinner party. Balancing these concerns, more women than men are now entering universities, and significant political groups lobby for women’s equality within the European Union.
In short, woman’s empire is no longer limited to her home in Europe, but her ability to experience life outside the home is still shaped by factors within it, as Lynn Abrams has also discussed in her chapter, pp. 14-53. Florence Nightingale noted this problem a century earlier, writing: ‘The family uses people, not for what they are, not for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for - for its own uses.’132 As long
As women’s work, domestic duties, political access and wealth are limited by older gendered notions of their ‘proper’ place vis-a-vis men and home, then women’s leisure will be shaped by these same conventions. Leisure for women is still in no way free.
World History
