Historiography

In examining these three centuries of women’s leisure, scholars have identified three interrelated strands in the history of European leisure: popular culture, leisure studies and consumption. The first strand concerns itself with the nature and persistence of popular cultural forms, and it embodies modern debates regarding ‘high’ versus ‘low’ culture. The second encompasses a wide variety of scholarly work from the investigations of twentieth-century critical theorists to leisure-studies professionals, all of whom try to understand the ‘problem’ of leisure time and its best use. Lastly, consumption has emerged as a counterpoint to studies of industrialisation and work, and this field has created a debate about the timing of the birth of consumer societies and their leisure pursuits. Through all these strands runs a subtext of class and gender, which is sometimes acknowledged and examined, but sometimes not. Although some scholars have examined women’s leisure pursuits from 1700 to 2000, the study of gender and leisure has been essentially under-represented in the larger debates over popular culture and the rise of a consumer society. This short historiography section will lay out some of the influential literature in the three strands of study and will conclude with works on women and leisure.

Peter Burke’s cross-national work on popular culture sets the tone for debate with his description of two divergent ‘cultures’ in Europe, that of the great learned men of the universities and the ‘low’ culture of the great majority of men and women. Although Burke sees the two cultures as related and intersecting, his critics often suggest that he simplifies complex relationships and ignores the minute differences in rank and society that are expressed in the communities of Europe through leisure activities. Some scholars have taken to using the phrase ‘popular cultures’ to evoke the ambiguities and interlocking natures of leisure activities.1 Much of this work does not use gender as a category for analysis, thereby ignoring the complicating factor that men and women of the same class or even the same household may not have experienced popular culture in the same way.

Leisure as a social problem and a socialising vehicle has occupied many intellectuals and social reformers writing in the past three centuries, but critical studies of leisure are primarily associated with twentieth-century writers. Cultural theorists, such as Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, working in inter-war and post-war Germany and the USA published volumes of scholarship outlining the problems of mass culture and the intellectual dulling that had accompanied industrial capitalism. Likewise, reformers in Britain and France sought ways to ‘use’ leisure to good advantage, echoing political appropriation of leisure time by parties as diverse as Britain’s Labour Party and Germany’s National Socialists. Rudy Koshar has usefully noted that ‘the history of leisure culture is clearly also the history of political culture, indeed of citizenship in the broad sense of social

Participation.’2 Recent work on leisure has studied its efficacy as social control, its variety of expressions and its limitations in the modern world.

Again, gendered studies of these phenomena are less common, but some British scholars, in particular, have embraced this research. Explicit contemporary attempts to theorise ‘leisure studies’ in Britain have resulted in collaborative projects such as Women’s Leisure, What Leisure? and Relative Freedoms: Women and Leisure. These books both question the relevance of studying leisure as a separate category for women. The authors of the first suggest that ‘the artificial separation of areas of life entitled “work” and “leisure” into different subsections of the discipline both marginalized the experiences of women and obscured the significant “overlaps” that happen in real life.’3 Women’s work and their leisure are in tension with one another, since often no clear delineation exists between the two. Historians such as Anna Clark, Claire Langhamer and Catriona Parratt use gender as a central category of analysis in order to illuminate many aspects of women’s leisure activities in Great Britain. While Parratt and Langhamer confine themselves to detailing women’s leisure, Clark picks apart the intricate relationships binding together and pulling apart plebian communities in Britain during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She examines leisure, work and sexuality to demonstrate the complicated popular culture of working people. Her work provides a model for the kind of studies needed for other parts of Europe and for other time frames in order to develop a comprehensive study of women, leisure and popular culture.4

Other work that casts light on women’s leisure in Europe often explicitly focuses on family life, work or industrialisation, discussing leisure time only as an aside. Examples of such studies include Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s influential work on middle-class England, Family Fortunes, Louise Tilly and Joan Scott’s Women, Work and Family, which examines working women’s lives in France and England, and Victoria de Grazia’s look at women in inter-war Italy, How Fascism Ruled Women. Scholars of imperialism have also touched on issues of leisure, travel and the imagination of empire in such diverse studies as Margaret Shennan’s Out in the Midday Sun: The British in Malaya, Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda’s edited collection, Domesticating the Empire (on French and Dutch colonialism) and Ann Laura Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire. Considering the component parts of leisure can yield interesting insights on women’s activities and desires over the past couple of centuries. Pioneering studies of women and sport in Europe, women’s education and reading, female socialisation and women’s participation in cultural change all provide material for the study of female leisure. Mary Lynn Stewart and Kathleen McCrone have both explored the development of women’s physical culture in France and England respectively. Barbara Burman’s edited collection on dressmaking and home sewing provides another window into female socialisation as does Matthew Hilton’s work on smoking. Put together, these disparate studies and others provide a clearer picture of how women spent their time and developed their identities as citizens and consumers.

Consumption has been an especially popular topic in recent years, with a plethora of histories emerging on the scholarly scene. Much of the debate has centred on the question of when a consumer society emerged in Europe. In opposition to that scholarly work are the more theoretically challenging philosophical and historical works that make up cultural studies. What both of these strands of historiographical work on consumption demonstrate is that consumer practices complicate our understanding of leisure. Is shopping a good use of leisure time? Does the pleasure of consuming represent leisure or a hegemonic economic model that enslaves populations? Beyond these questions, the study of consumption has brought a whole new set of sources and artefacts and has provided a richer context for the study of leisure. Of particular interest are those works that deal explicitly with gender and consumption. One of the best known of these is The Sex of Things, a wide-ranging collection that contributes substantially to our understanding of women’s social functions, the nature of modernity and cultural studies. The essays examine ‘the sexual division of labor around consumption’ and expose gendered representations of consumers, commodities and cultures in European history.5 Other individual studies of women’s consumption practices include studies of such everyday activities as shopping, driving and housework. Despite the emergence of new work on consumption and leisure, this field is still understudied in history circles. As Mary Louise Roberts noted in 1998, ‘In a society such as ours, in which there is virtually no area of life. . . that remains uncommodified. . . we can hardly afford to continue our historical neglect of consumerism.’6

The fields of cultural studies of consumption, the history of popular culture and the sociological and social historical work on leisure form the historiographical context for this chapter. In general, this historiography encompasses growing fields that utilise diverse primary sources and that offer multiple opportunities for new scholars to enter the dialogue.