Time, work and leisure

The History of Leisure

Before the Industrial Revolution leisure for most people meant rest from work. Leisure ac­tivities were not a matter of individual choice but part of the regular pattern of social life. County fairs, quilting bees, and sheep shearings were social gatherings that combined work and play. These pleasures were justified as a reward for work, or as a means of restoring oneself for more work. As the workplace became sepa­rated from the home, such social activities be­gan to be defined as "nonwork," or recreation. During the first half of the nineteenth century, new forms of commercial entertainment be­came available to people in all social classes. Variety shows and minstrel shows transformed the theater; travelling circuses reached even out-of-the-way small towns; horse races, boxing matches, and foot races became popular. In the cities more people had more money to spend at amusement parks, public dance halls, and beer gardens. In short, the leisure industry was born. In response to a larger urban population's demand for open-air recreation, local govern­ments created public parks and playgrounds. New York's Central Park was opened in 1857, Philadelphia's Fairmount Park in 1867, and Boston's Franklin Park in 1883. Believing that "Satan finds mischief for idle hands to do," wor­ried city dwellers encouraged public schools and other agencies to provide "wholesome" pastimes during the nonworking hours. Li­braries and public recreational centers were built as noncommercial alternatives to the pool halls, burlesque theaters, and saloons that social reformers saw as breeding grounds for vice.

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Leisure is usually measured in free time, or the opposite of paid work. A gradual decrease in working hours over the past century has reduced the average work week by about 25 hours since the 1890s. This dramatic increase in free time has actually been some­what overrated, since it is measured against the exceptionally long working hours that prevailed during the early stages of capitalism. A hundred years ago steelworkers worked a 12-hour shift, seven days a week, and 14-hour days were com­mon for factory workers. Seen in longer historical perspective, the amount of free time we have today seems less like a remarkable mod­ern achievement and more like a return to nor­mal. In pre-industrial England, for example, the length of the working day was about 11 or 12 hours in the fifteenth century and 10 hours in the seventeenth. Workers in other historical periods also enjoyed more holidays. The medi­eval calendar generally observed 115 holidays a year, which, when added to 52 Sundays, made 167 days of rest—or an average work week of less than four days.

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Housework today is more productive (be­cause more services are performed and more goods produced for every hour of work) and less laborious than it was at the turn of the cen­tury, yet most women find it just as time-con­suming and demanding. For working wives with full-time jobs, a 75-hour week of paid and unpaid work leaves precious little time for leisure.

Compared to 50 or 100 years ago, Ameri­cans today seem to have more free time but not proportionately more leisure. The next section considers the question of how they spend it.

The Uses of Leisure

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goes quietly home, collapses on the couch, eats and drinks alone, belongs to nothing, reads nothing, knows nothing, votes for no one, hangs around the home and street, watches... the TV programmes shade into one another, too tired to lift himself off the couch for the act of selection, too bored to switch the dials.

The compensatory leisure hypothesis, on the other hand, suggests that leisure activities pro­vide an outlet for the frustrations built up by unsatisfying work. Wilensky's caricature pic­tures an automobile assembly line worker who,

for eight hours gripped bodily to the main line, doing repetitive, low-skilled, machine-paced work which is wholly ungratifying, comes rushing out of the plant gate helling down the super-highway at eighty miles an hour in a second-hand Cadillac Eldorado, stops off for a beer and starts a bar-room brawl, [and] goes home and beats his wife.

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The second type of relationship between work and leisure is the opposition pattern, in which leisure activities are intentionally very different from experiences at work and “business and pleasure” are never mixed. People with physically tough jobs, like miners and waitresses, find relief in leisure; others hate their work so much that they don’t want to be reminded of it off the job. This pattern corresponded to the compensatory leisure hypothesis.

The third type of relationship is neutrality. Although leisure and work do not overlap, work and play are not deliberately segregated. This pattern is typical of people in “grey” jobs, such as routine clerical or semi-skilled manual workers, who find their jobs boring but not oppressive. They define leisure as relaxation.