Sport, Leisure and Social Relations (RLE Sports Studies)

John Horne, David Jary, Alan Tomlinson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138777552
• eBook ISBN: 9781317678700
• Edition: 1

When this book was first published the study of sport had been largely neglected by sociologists. The contributions to this volume bring the sports field, the leisure centre and everyday leisure activities to a more central position within the sociological enterprise. Whether amateur or professional, sport contributes to wider relations of power, privilege and domination and this debate represents an important phase in the sociology of sport and leisure.

Men and women at play: gender, life-cycle and leisure

Joan Smith

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I Leisure and the social obligations of men and women

Defining the concept of leisure has posed problems for sociologists. Traditionally in Britain leisure was often defined in negative terms: leisure was not work. Nor was it the labour necessary for home and child-care. Consequently leisure pursuits were often considered as ‘left over’ after the ‘real’ worlds of work and home. Outside Britain, however, some sociologists in America and France took a quite different approach, arguing that leisure was a meaningful goal in its own right (Kaplan 1960; Dumazedier 1967). Dumazedier argued that in leisure ‘relaxation gives recovery from fatigue, entertainment spells deliverance from boredom’, and personal development ‘serves to liberate the individual from the daily automatism of thought and action’ (Dumazedier 1967:16). In such perspectives leisure needs were seen as less separate from ‘real’ life than in the British approach and it was not inconceivable that leisure needs might dominate a person’s approach to work, or be central to family life. More recently Kelly, following Cheek and Burch (1976), has argued that the quintessential nature of leisure is not only freedom of choice, and engagement in a leisure pursuit for its own sake, but also its role in constructing such ‘real’ worlds, particularly in constructing family and friendship circles (Kelly 1983:5–19). Leisure is seen as central to all processes of ‘social bonding’ and it is for this reason that the most ‘constrained’ type of leisure activity, with family members and friends, is often valued most by participants.

But moving from the question of what is leisure to who is leisured raises real problems for leisure research. What if the individual is a woman and not a man: what are her means of deliverance from fatigue, boredom and the ‘daily automatism of thought and action’? Has leisure research taken seriously her choice of ‘means of deliverance’ – a choice that might lead to resting and reading, rather than rock-climbing? How far is a woman’s ‘choice’ of leisure constrained by her social status and relationships; her predominant responsibility for home and child-care; her often limited financial resources and lack of financial autonomy; her circles’ expectations of ‘what women do and don’t do’; the influence of sexual and domestic partners over her leisure choice; and of her own self-perception and previous history of self-development?

In this article two approaches to the study of leisure behaviour will be reviewed: first, the influential work of the Rapoports, Kelly, and Young and Willmott on the importance of life-cycle stage for leisure activity; and second, the more recent work by feminist leisure researchers on the relationship between gender and leisure activity. The aim of the article will, then, be to provide an assessment of these approaches in the light of a secondary analysis of the leisure data made available by the 1980 General Household Survey (GHS).¹ In doing this, the article will also provide an evaluation of the GHS data from the point of view of the leisure researcher.

The GHS leisure data sets do have considerable limitations and these are reviewed later. The data sets are, however, the best national data set on leisure, and cover approximately 10,000 households. (For a general discussion on using the GHS for secondary data analysis see Gilbert, Dale and Arber, 1983.) They are more than adequate for an initial exploration of the dual impact of life-cycle and gender on the leisure experience of men and women, allowing answers to two key questions. First, how different are the participation rates in different leisure activities of men and women in the same family circumstances in any one year? Second, how different are participation rates of women in different family circumstances? A comparative investigation of these different participation patterns using the 1980 GHS data set will demonstrate how far gender and how far stage of the family life-cycle constrains women’s leisure behaviour. Moreover, the sheer size of the GHS data set allows for simple controls on age and occupation of respondents, also making it possible to question Kelly’s suggestion (see below) that social status and social class are poor indicators for predicting leisure behaviour.

a) The family life-cycle and leisure behaviour

Early British leisure studies often omitted the variable of gender altogether in analysing patterns of participation. Research into gender differences in patterns of leisure stemmed mainly from community studies and the sociology of the family (see Talbot 1979). Other, apparently more gender-aware leisure studies remained problematic. In concentrating on the family as a centre for leisure, they underemphasised the importance of the differences in the experience of leisure within the family.

In Britain, for example, the Rapoports (with Ziona Strelitz) in their study Leisure and the Family Life Cycle, began with Wilensky’s summary of American studies, which indicated that leisure behaviour was patterned by class, as well as by individual orientation and family-home-local influences. From their review of British and American leisure studies the Rapoports argued that family situation, especially the particular stage of the family life-cycle, should be placed at the centre of three overlapping areas of social life – work, family, and leisure (Rapoport, Rapoport and Strelitz 1975:1–20). Their research, however, failed to focus on the differences between men’s and women’s experience of leisure, despite the fact that, in contrast to previous research, each person’s leisure experience was placed in the context of their particular stage in their family life-cycle.

It is John Kelly’s work both here and in the United States that has extended and strengthened the Rapoports’ case-study approach by directing attention to the utility of survey data. Kelly’s United States data demonstrates that the only activities in the top twenty leisure activities that do not usually take place with other family members are reading, arts and crafts, non-familial conversations and hobbies. Of activities with one other person, 70 per cent are with another family member (ibid., p. 23). In a three-community survey in the United States Kelly found that family life-cycle was a major variable in leisure, especially becoming a parent (Kelly 1981:16). Such arguments may appear obvious but, as Kelly suggests, a weakness of leisure research in Britain is that family structure has not been considered as critical a discriminating variable as, for example, social class (Kelly 1981:21).

Kelly, however, fails to identify gender as a key variable. In his Leisure Identities and Interactions, he produces tables on family leisure patterns for adults at different stages of their life-cycle, but fails to distinguish between male and female (Kelly 1983:134), providing only two pages on gender differences in leisure (ibid.: 38–40). The heart of the book is about the centrality of the family life-cycle to leisure experience, yet gender differences are virtually ignored. This contrasts sharply with recent feminist orientated leisure research which has taken the experience of women in the family as its starting point (Deem 1982, 1984a, and this volume: Green, Hebron and Woodward 1985; Wimbush 1985).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: The sociological analysis of sport and leisure
• The changing work/leisure balance in Britain: 1961–1984
• Men and women at play: gender, life cycle and leisure
• The Figurational Sociology of Sport and Leisure of Elias and Dunning: an exposition and a critique
• Leisure, symbolic power and the life course
• The body, sport and power relations
• ‘Boys muscle in where angels fear to tread’ – girls’ sub-cultures and physical activities
• The exploitation of disadvantage: the occupational sub–culture of the boxer
• The politics of women’s leisure
• Leisure, the state and collective consumption