Until recently the Sociology of Leisure was dominated by theoretical approaches which made women's experiences invisible. Drawing upon feminist perspectives this book re-conceptualises leisure in order to provide a more informed understanding of women's leisure. The authors argue that such an examination necessarily involves a study of women's daily lives which views leisure in relation to the structure of their lives as a whole. Drawing upon a major study of Sheffield women's leisure and other sources, the processes of negotiation and social control are cited as crucial in determing women's access to free time and the resources required to enjoy leisure.

Leisure, Women, and Gender is part of an ongoing examination that explores and elaborates issues of leisure for girls and women. The book is both an update of A Leisure of One's Own: A Feminist Perspective on Women's Leisure (1989) and Both Gains and Gaps: Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Leisure (1996) and a departure from these earlier works, in its process and structure. Specifically, in this volume, rather than writing about the research that others are doing, we invited some of those researchers to talk about how they came to study leisure, women, and gender; what they have learned from their research; and to reflect on directions for future research. Hence, organizationally and structurally it falls in the “middle ground” between a co-authored and an edited book: it mixes writing by the book’s editors with the voices of invited scholars, who contribute central and additional perspectives regarding the topics.

"This book looks at women as producers and consumers of leisure experiences. Women produce and consume leisure through a variety of activities as a way to enhance self-actualization and personal empowerment - sometimes through resistance to cultural norms and expectations"--

This text draws upon recent feminist theoretical interventions to suggest a framework for the history of women's leisure which explicitly problematises the category leisure and foregrounds its relationship to work within women's lives.

Displaying Women explores the role of women in the representation of leisure in turn-of-the-century New York. To see and be seen--on Fifth Avenue and Broadway, in Central Park, and in the fashionable uptown hotels and restaurants--was one of the fundamental principles in the display aesthetic of New York's fashionable society. Maureen E. Montgomery argues for a reconsideration of the role of women in the bourgeois elite in turn-of-the-century America. By contrasting multiple images of women drawn from newspapers, magazines, private correspondence, etiquette manuals and the New York fiction of Edith Wharton, Henry James and others, she offers a convincing antidote to the long-standing tendency in women's history to overlook women whose class affiliations have put them in a position of power.

This study examines the complex relationship between women and leisure, drawing upon recent feminist theory. The text charts the changes in perception, representation and experiences of leisure for women between 1920 and 1960, and relates the changes to life cycle lines.

Wide-ranging and challenging, this book offers a host of new insights into how leisure theory has handled the question of gender difference and inequality. Providing a critical introduction to the leading positions in leisure theory, Betsy Wearing guides the reader through their strengths and weaknesses from a feminist perspective. This book draws attention to the various leisure experiences that women encounter and construct in their everyday lives and the meanings that these experiences have for them. Her perspective takes into account such poststructuralist ideas as multiple subjectivities of women and multiple femininities; the possibilities of resistance to male dominance in leisure; the potential through leisure of rewriting masculine and feminine scripts; and leisure as a site of struggle to challenge hegemonic masculinity.

This groundbreaking study surveys how working-class women, restricted by gender, time, and financial means, as well as cultural and social tensions, managed to find spheres of leisure and recreation.

The dilemmas of work and leisure for women at the turn-of-the-century.