Annals of Leisure Research

ISSN: 1174-5398 (Print) 2159-6816 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ranz20

A leisure of one’s own: a feminist perspective on

women’s leisure

Heather L. Jeffrey

To cite this article: Heather L. Jeffrey (2017): A leisure of one’s own: a feminist perspective on
women’s leisure, Annals of Leisure Research, DOI: 10.1080/11745398.2017.1377858

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/11745398.2017.1377858

Published online: 13 Sep 2017.

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 ANNALS OF LEISURE RESEARCH, 2017

CLASSIC BOOK REVIEW

A leisure of one’s own: a feminist perspective on women’s leisure, by Karla A.

Henderson, M. Deborah Bialeschki, Susan M. Shaw, and Valeria J. Freysinger, State
College, PA, Venture Publishing Inc., 1989, 186 pp., ISBN: 0910251290

I believe it to be altogether appropriate and incredibly depressing to begin a review of A Leisure

of One’s Own: A feminist perspective on women’s leisure with a quote from the eponymous book
that influenced one of the future scenarios predicted at the close of the text:
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Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death

before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or
the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but
they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of
them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams
dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without
being believable. There were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimen-
sion of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white
spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. (Atwood [1996] 1985, 89)

It is depressing because as the quote highlights, no change is instantaneous and much of

what the book highlighted in 1989 is still somewhat true today. The authors highlighted
how women were joining the workforce in increasing numbers at the close of the 1980s,
but that many of their positions were derogatively deemed ‘women’s work’. This contributed
to their work being devalued and women being paid less. The Fawcett Society estimates that it
will take another 62 years to close the gender pay gap in the UK (The Fawcett Society listed this
estimation on its website in 2017). Even though ‘women’s work’ led to some women becoming
economically empowered, it also created a ‘double day’ for many women who had to work
both in and out of the home.
Related to this was the problematisation of the commonly accepted definition of leisure as
time away from paid work. At that time many women were working as unpaid housewives, and
one can hardly imagine washing dishes or cooking could be a leisure activity. The authors’ pro-
blematisation was inclusive not just of women, but of the Others who had been overlooked by
scholars socialized in a patriarchal system where traditional masculine ideas shaped norms and
discourses:

To define leisure, however, as time away from “work” (paid employment) is obviously proble-
matic for people who are not formally employed in the labor market: children and adolescents,
students, the elderly, and the unemployed as well as many women who are full-time house-
wives and homemakers. (Henderson et al. 1989, 10)

Women’s unpaid work in the home was not valued, and arguably this situation has not
changed in almost three decades. Part of the brilliance of the book is that it questioned defi-
nitions of leisure, by asking whose leisure – for example a trip away often involved women’s
work. Women were the ones who were expected to plan, organize, pack and prepare alongside
continuing the domestic chores expected of them in the home. One man’s leisure was another
woman’s work, and it was noted that women often had a lot less time for leisure, due to both
their double day and their involvement as an enabler of family leisure.
Yet, this was not the primary reason given for the significance of studying women’s leisure.
Women’s leisure was (and is) important to study, not just because of time (i.e. women have less
 2 BOOK REVIEW

time to spend on leisure activities), but also because it allows the evaluation of choice. Leisure
may provide women with a way to value themselves and shift gender stereotypes. This link
between leisure and oppression predestined the book to be a valuable addition not just to
the leisure literature, but also the women’s studies literature. Linking leisure with freedom jus-
tifies the study of the former as a site for critical scholars engaging in issues of oppression and
discrimination.
A Leisure of One’s Own also provides an historical perspective on women’s leisure by challen-
ging the way HIStory has been written, noting how because of who had written history certain
perspectives on what constitutes or can be considered as leisure may have been overlooked.
This is particularly pertinent when considering the fractured nature of women’s leisure, or the
way in which women’s leisure grew out of spectating or cheering men on. This historical per-
spective allows the reader to understand how leisure has traditionally been in cahoots with the
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patriarchal conditioning of gendered identities.

The notion of the ideal woman is introduced as a discourse that culminated in a preoccupa-
tion with how she looks rather than how she feels, and this is another aspect of the book that is
relevant today. Recently, research has highlighted key issues concerning the disciplining of
women’s ‘beach bodies’ (Small 2016, 2017), perhaps in relation to new societal changes that
could not have been predicted by the book. Social media has opened spaces for global femin-
ism, but also created new layers of confinement for both women and men, as we strive to (re)p-
resent ourselves on-line.
The book closes by discussing the potential possibilities or potentialities for the situation of
women in the year 2020. These scenarios are the Handmaid’s Tale, Wanderground, Equal Rights,
and Social Issue. With 2020 but a few years away I wonder if their suggestions were actually a
prophecy. The Handmaid’s Tale was recently shown as a televised series and part of its popu-
larity lies in its prophetic possibilities. The year 2017 feels apocalyptical, with the rise of right
wing politics in some contexts and a continuing lack of political support for the environment.
There are also obvious shifts towards more traditional gender roles in some of these countries.
At the time of writing there have been a series of political attempts to stunt women’s reproduc-
tive freedom in Poland, for example. The reinstatement of the Global Gag Rule by President
Trump might be another example of this. Yet, I also see elements of the other scenarios.
While I have never supported the idea of a matriarchy, the Wanderground scenario is appealing,
but far from my reality. The appeal is in the shift of the individualistic society in which many of
us live. Total equality has not been achieved in any country (World Economic Forum 2016), but
women have been somewhat integrated within the patriarchy in some contexts as described in
the Equal Rights scenario. In certain contexts, it might be said that the patriarchy is growing
sensitive to aspects of race, class, and gender as aspects of oppression as highlighted in the
Social Issue scenario. Here we might situate the recent legalization of same sex marriage in
Chile, for example.
In 1989 the authors were careful to acknowledge the importance of culture in constructing
gendered identities. This understanding has perhaps been developed to understand gender
from a much more post-structuralist position of performance and fluidity, as scholars
engage with areas such as queer theory. Even then the authors were careful to acknowledge
that the book was lacking from an intersectional approach that might be more common place
in today’s gender literature. Yet, there is still much scholarly activity in leisure studies and
related fields that has not heeded these warnings and continues to add women and stir.
A Leisure of One’s Own might be critiqued for a focus on women, but ‘focusing solely on
women, has been partially effective in making women’s lives visible and calling attention to
the androcentric nature of traditional history.’ (Freysinger et al. 2013, 12). A focus on women
is still necessary today, perhaps especially within an academia that often focuses on celebrating
 ANNALS OF LEISURE RESEARCH 3

the ‘founding fathers’. Feminist scholarly activity should be part of a wider political project, and
we are all able to participate by citing those that have written before us. We are all standing on
the shoulders of giants, and the giants do not always have male bodies.
At the beginning of the book the authors stressed how they hoped it would become an
impetus for more research on women’s leisure, and gender and leisure. The book can be cele-
brated as having achieved this aim, as not only did the book become the first in a series of on-
going investigations of leisure for girls and women written by the same authors, but gender
and leisure or leisure related fields such as tourism has gained much more scholarly interest
since its publication. In order to understand where we are it is important to understand
where we have come from and that is why this text is important, not just to those studying
leisure and gender, but to all leisure scholars.
A leisure of One’s Own: A Feminist Perspective on Women’s Leisure, published in 1989 was a
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ground breaking text as one of the first full length books on women’s leisure. The text has
been updated and expanded by Both Gains and Gaps: Feminist Perspectives on Women’s
Leisure (Henderson et al. 1996) and Leisure, Women, and Gender (Freysinger et al. 2013).

References
Atwood, M. (1996) 1985. The Handmaid‘s Tale. London: Vintage.
Freysinger, V. J., S. M. Shaw, K. A. Henderson, and M. D. Bialeschki. 2013. Leisure, Women, and Gender. Urbana, IL:
Venture Publishing.
Henderson, K. A., M. D. Bialeschki, S. M. Shaw, and V. J. Freysinger. 1996. Both Gains and Gaps: Feminist Perspectives
on Women’s Leisure. State College: Venture Publishing.
Small, J. 2016. “Holiday Bodies: Young Women and their Appearance.” Annals of Tourism Research 58: 18–32.
Small, J. 2017. “Women’s ‘Beach Body’ in Australian Women’s Magazines.” Annals of Tourism Research 63: 23–33.
World Economic Forum. 2016. The Global Gender Gap Report. Geneva, Switzerland: The World Economic Forum.
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/GGGR16/WEF_Global_Gender_Gap_Report_2016.pdf.

Heather L. Jeffrey
Business School, University of Bedfordshire, Luton, UK
Heather.L.Jeffrey@Gmail.com
© 2017 Heather L. Jeffrey
https://doi.org/10.1080/11745398.2017.1377858