A means to get out of the house: working-class women, leisure and bingo

Abstract

Despite a vast expansion in literature on the sociology of leisure in an age of supposed ‘leisure explosion’, research on this topic has largely neglected the particular constraints surrounding women’s leisure. With few exceptions feminist academics in Britain have been slow to recognise the importance of inequality in leisure and its relation to other areas of women’s oppression. The absence of work in this field is not difficult to understand. In the nineteenth century, women of the middle classes began to make demands for equality with men by demonstrating against their exclusion from the world of paid work and their confinement to the world of non-work or leisure. Exclusion from, and inequalities within, paid work, together with calls to reappraise women’s work in the home, have remained central to the women’s movement.