Leisure

views updated

LEISURE.

VARIETIES OF LEISURE IN 1900 AND DEMANDS
FOR CHANGE
USES OF LEISURE, 1900–1950
POSTWAR LEISURE TRENDS
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Time free from work and other life- or family-sustaining activities changed dramatically across the twentieth century. Although regional and social distinctions, established long before this epoch, continued to shape leisure activities, a series of political, technological, and economic changes both expanded and transformed the use of leisure time.

VARIETIES OF LEISURE IN 1900 AND DEMANDS
FOR CHANGE

Free time varied by class and occupation in 1900. While seasonal religious festivals had declined in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in rural areas, especially in southern Europe, leisure time depended on the weather, hours of daylight, and lulls in the agricultural work cycle and the saints' days that often coincided with such lulls. In areas in which industrial and modern commercial conditions predominated, leisure was fixed by the factory and shop hours (mostly set at ten hours per six-day week). In skilled, textile, and white-collar trades in Britain and more rarely on the Continent, a Saturday half-day prevailed, making possible an afternoon for club activities, shopping, and the development of the Saturday tradition of spectator sports (especially football, that is, soccer). Few hours free from work and, as important, slow and inadequate public transportation, limited leisure activities among wage earners. Drinking, games, and conversation at neighborhood bars dominated male leisure time, though in larger cities cheap theater was available. Despite efforts of reformers (including trade unionists, socialists, and Catholics) to promote alternative leisure pursuits such as gardening and family outings, especially on Sunday, drink was often a refuge from the family hearth.

In 1900 few wage earners had the opportunity for annual vacations. While some trades (especially northern English textile and related workers) had established holiday savings clubs to facilitate treks to seaside resorts such as Blackpool during annual one-week factory shutdowns, this was rare even in Britain. Most seasonal factory or shop closures were simply times of unemployment or of seeking alternative work—for example, in harvesting or food processing. Professionals, business owners, and a few privileged white-collar workers had paid annual leaves. This assured that seaside resorts and holiday touring was predominantly bourgeois. By 1900, travel agencies such as Thomas Cook of England booked holiday packages for the English middle class to Switzerland, France, and northern Italy especially. Resorts for gambling and genteel pursuits had long developed on the French and Italian Riviera and at San Sebastián on the Basque coast of Spain. Major cities were centers of middleclass shopping and entertainment (sometimes combined as when bourgeois women visited Paris to get measured for clothing and went to the theater while waiting for delivery).

Demand for increased leisure time had been central to European labor movements even before the Second (Socialist) International called for the eight-hour workday in 1889. This goal was supposed to stabilize employment (diminishing seasonal irregularities in work and forcing businesses to increase their staff to compensate for reduced work hours), but it also was intended to establish a human right to time free from labor. Leisure in this sense was the same as liberty. Labor and progressive politicians across Europe insisted not only that increased productivity made increased leisure time an economic possibility, but also that more free time compensated for the increased pace of modern industrial and commercial work. In the decade before World War I, shop clerks agitated in Britain and France for laws against Sunday commerce. Reformers also argued that Saturday afternoons free from wage work would provide fathers the opportunity to spend time with their children and that paid vacations would restore the spiritual unity of the family that had been undermined by the modern economy's division of the family unit during work (a view embraced also by the Right). Early in the twentieth century, organized workers resisted two- or three-shift systems, especially in textiles where women predominated. The ideal was not merely a short, but also a compressed, workday to free longer blocks of time for private life, especially for meeting the needs of coordinating family schedules.

The eight-hour day became a nearly universal concession only during the labor upsurge that accompanied the closing years of World War I and its unsettled aftermath (1917–1919), extending in principle from Bolshevik Russia to Britain. The two-day weekend (and forty-hour workweek) became a goal of labor movements in France and Britain in the 1930s. This standard became law in France in June 1936 during the strikes that accompanied the beginning of the leftist Popular Front government. Business, however, bitterly opposed this apparent unilateral disarmament of the French economy and military, and it was revoked in late 1938. Many wage earners in Europe won the weekend/forty-hour week only after World War II (for example, in 1958 in West Germany).

The movement for the paid annual holiday also intensified in the interwar period. Between 1919 and 1925, legislation provided paid vacations in six eastern and central European countries. The movement peaked in the mid-1930s with the widespread support for the two-week paid vacation in France in 1936 and a week's holiday in many British industries in 1938. In the generation after World War II, the vacation became the leisure concept of choice for most Europeans: The one- or two-week holiday expanded to three or more weeks in the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1980s, 80 percent of West Germans enjoyed six weeks of vacation.

Before 1945, the democratization of leisure threatened economic and social elites on multiple fronts. In the view of businesspeople, increased leisure would raise labor costs and reduce future economic expansion. Cultural conservatives were anxious that the masses would invade traditional bourgeois resorts (a fear raised during the French Popular Front period, for example) and worried that free time meant dissipation for a working class still unprepared for uplifting leisure. Intellectuals such as the French industrial sociologist Georges Friedmann argued that without meaningful work, leisure became mere escapism and passive excitement in pleasure. The so-called Frankfurt School, a group of neo-Marxist German sociologists in the interwar period, developed an even more pessimistic view of what they called the "culture industry." In pursuit of profit, the pleasure industry manufactured a leisure time of pseudochoice and illusory freedom. Sigmund Freud doubted that civilization could withstand any significant liberation from work. The growth of free time in the early twentieth century, however, produced more optimistic points of view. One largely British and French school of thought argued that increased leisure would produce a more egalitarian culture and even more sympathetic people. John C. Hammond, C. D. Burns, and Bertrand Russell advanced the idea of a progressive democratization of leisure.

USES OF LEISURE, 1900–1950

Between the wars, the pub or bar remained the center of male working-class leisure in Europe. At the heart of bar culture was the reciprocity of "treating" for drinks. A British study of pub life in the late 1930s likened the Saturday night pub habit to a Sabbath meeting—a liturgy of group drinking and "treating" and a litany of verbal exchanges. While "respectable" women increasingly appeared in pubs by the 1930s, the age of pubgoers also rose because the young were more attracted to the cinema or dance hall. The pub owner continued to perform the complex role of social mediator, banker, and participant in the nightly round of gossip, drinking, singing of familiar music hall numbers, and bar games. In addition to providing insurance benefits, clubs provided rooms for moderate drinking, darts, billiards, and singsongs, and occasionally fund-raising in card games. Boxing, prostitution, and other male pastimes were on the decline in the interwar years. But the male-oriented and casual leisure of the mechanical gaming arcade flourished in the cities. The most notable development in working-class leisure in the twentieth century was the growth of offsite gambling.

Women's daily leisure was considerably more constrained because of the demands of housework and child-tending as well as wage work. Socializing over the washing-line, at the corner shop, and with nearby relatives was supplemented by the occasional visit to the cinema or hour with her husband at his bar or club. By the 1910s, movie houses were accommodating women (62 percent of the audience in one British survey of the 1930s), often as part of regular shopping trips. By the 1930s, home-based work was eased by the radio. There were ten times more radios in Britain in 1931 than in France. By 1939, 71 percent of households in Britain held a radio license. But those women who held jobs outside the home had scarcely two hours of their own per day because of domestic chores waiting them.

In the wake of the eight-hour day, a wide range of movements for public recreation emerged across Europe. Government grants for adult education expanded in Britain and elsewhere in the 1920s, though these efforts were limited by budgetary constraints and then by cutbacks during the depression of the 1930s. British groups such as the Holiday Fellowship (founded in 1913) organized hiking and camping trips, while the Youth Hostel Association (1929) and what is now the Ramblers' Association (1931) promoted cheap, open-air holidays. Although these groups were mostly composed of clerical and skilled workers, some attracted manual laborers with their promise of relief from the bleakness of the industrial landscape. And, the nonprofit holiday camp, which had roots in the 1890s, grew especially in the 1920s.

The organized vacation was advanced by ideologues of the Right and Left. Both the Italian Fascist dopolavoro (recreational club) and the Nazi Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) organized holiday tours, festivals, and tours to instill loyalty to the regime. The Left attempted to create alternatives to commercial spectator sports and to the sports press and clubs patronized by employers or the Catholic Church. Where possible, communists organized sports and cultural groups, hoping to appeal to members' families and to create a more fun-loving image of the cause. The French Popular Front government of 1936–1937 opted for a less political form of mass tourism. Its minister for sports and leisure, Léo Lagrange, cajoled railway companies into accepting a program of inexpensive tickets for family excursions, built 653 sports arenas, introduced physical education in almost half the French schools, and advocated autonomous municipal leisure clubs, independent of political patronage. But Lagrange also believed that French visits to national historical sites and travels to meet fellow citizens in different regions and walks of life would lead to deeper patriotic sentiments.

Public recreation movements often failed to compete successfully against commercial leisure. British travel and holiday camp cooperatives lacked capital and managerial skill and were co-opted by commercial efforts such as Billy Butlin's holiday camps, which from 1937 offered much of the camaraderie of the Holiday Fellowship without the excessive seriousness and cliquishness that often bedeviled the nonprofit and volunteer holiday movement. It was easier and often more desirable to participate in a club organized by an outside commercial impresario than by a group of the participants themselves.

In 1900 commercialized entertainments were already well established in the form of traveling and annual fairs, music halls, spectator sports, and gambling. The amusement park dating from 1843 in Copenhagen was expanded to Vienna and elsewhere in the 1890s. The introduction of the cheap electric streetcar in the 1890s and subway slightly later made it possible for even wage earners to escape the neighborhood bar to traverse the city and its environs for the anonymous pleasures of mass entertainments. The seaside holiday was another commercial leisure. By the early twentieth century, Blackpool and its many imitators had become well-established sites for perfunctory sea-bathing and a vast range of amusements—from gypsy fortune-tellers, pinball boards, and roller coasters to music hall programs and rides up the Blackpool Tower (built in 1895).

Despite the European origins of the automobile (invented by the German Carl Benz in 1885 and manufactured soon thereafter by the French), the car played a relatively small role in European leisure before World War II. Europeans failed to develop low- and midpriced automobiles as did the American Henry Ford. The industry's concentration on the luxury vehicle and on military uses of internal combustion engines before World War I meant that in 1929, for example, there was one car for every 4.5 Americans but only one for every 42 British. In the interwar years, the auto brought picnicking, camping, and touring to the smart set with elite auto touring guides provided by the French tire company Michelin. The open-air bus, or charabanc, was available for pub crawling (the original "magical mystery tour"). But most wage earners were confined to the fixed routes of the rail.

POSTWAR LEISURE TRENDS

Following on the movements of the 1930s, post-war efforts to organize leisure increased dramatically in postwar France with the building of local youth and cultural centers, children's holiday camps, and sports facilities. Numbers of sports clubs rose 2.6 times in France in the 1960s and 1970s. By 1984, there were about 150,000 sports clubs in France enrolling some 12 million members. From 1960 to 1984, cultural clubs increased even more dramatically, from 600 to 4,116. French promoters of popular arts and recreation stressed wide participation, and many eventually lost their political or religious character to emphasize instead the democratization of culture. Government facilities and educators have contributed to the growth of amateurism in music and the other arts. In Britain, agencies such as the Arts Council (1946), national parks (1949), and the Ministry of Sport (1962) subsidized public recreational facilities of all kinds. Sociologists found in the mid-1980s that middle-class people in particular still readily joined groups around a wide variety of "enthusiasms" (caving, morris dancing, lace making, and lapidary, for example). Such organizations stressed group solidarity, and often did so with a militant opposition to commercialization as if in protest of the profit motive of sellers and passivity of buyers. In Germany, East and West, local sports, leisure, and arts facilities were built after the war, though in the East, the lack of opportunities for travel and access to new commercial forms of leisure probably contributed to the popular uprising of 1989 and decision to reunite with the Federal Republic in 1990.

Yet again commercialized leisure predominated. Following the austerity of postwar reconstruction, increased incomes allowed for new and expanded forms of leisure. Television was slower to enter the home than in the United States (in 1959, when over 90 percent of American households contained a TV, only 66 percent of British households did; in 1963, only 30 percent of French homes had TVs). This changed rapidly: TVs were in 90 percent of British homes by 1970 and 86 percent of French homes by 1976. A British study in 1974 found that half of leisure time was spent watching the screen; and by 1980 TVs were on 2.3 hours per day in French homes. Only 51 percent of French watched TV daily in 1967, but 82 percent admitted to doing so by 1987. Still, over the same period the percentage who read a book in the course of a month scarcely changed (going from 32 to 31 percent), and the rate of attending museums rose from 10 to 32 percent.

Increasingly, European families spend larger portions of their income on their homes and furnishings, suggesting a domestication of leisure. While in 1950 food comprised 49 percent of the average French family budget and housing absorbed merely 14 percent, by 1985 food decreased to 19 percent and housing costs rose to 26 percent of family income. Suburbanization and detached houses gradually supplanted the traditional urban apartment living, and with these changes came new domestic leisure endeavors, especially the do-it-yourself movement. Automobile ownership also rose sharply, from 10 percent of French households in 1950 to 75 percent by 1980. The popularization of the family car transformed tourism. Blackpool's Central Station, the great railway hub of tourist arrivals as recently as the early 1950s, closed in 1964, reflecting the rising importance of the bus as well as the private car. Even more, the car facilitated holiday trips to quieter or sunnier climes in southwest England or on the European continent. It also increased the popularity of heritage tourism to ancient estates and castles.

Economic change after World War II broke up many old neighborhoods, especially in England, fostering new gang-based leisure styles among youth. For example, the amphetamine-driven and clothes-conscious "mods" of the early 1960s protested, through "rituals" of consumption, the dead-end jobs that they knew to be their collective fate. Groups such as the skinheads in the 1960s retained a tough macho image associated with the working class. Some protested their loss of territory by attacking immigrants and through gang violence at or near football (soccer) matches.

The most dramatic leisure trend in Europe is the growth of vacations and tourism. Whereas Americans tended to use their affluence to accumulate goods and activities around the home, Europeans spent much of it on holidays. In the 1990s, Americans had an average of only 13 days of vacation per year as compared to 35 in Germany and 42 in Italy. By the end of the century, tourism accounted for 5.5 percent of the European Union's economy, with twice that share for Spain and France. Especially enthusiastic tourists were the Germans, who in 1986 accounted for 20 percent of European recreational travelers (compared to the French, 11.8 percent, and the British, 9.9 percent). Moreover, the car became the vehicle of tourist choice: in 1985, 68 percent of European tourism was by automobile, compared to only 14 percent by train and 13 percent by plane. Despite resistance from cultural purists, even Euro Disneyland (1992) near Paris became successful with lowered prices and more thrill rides (along with a name change in 1994 to Disneyland Paris). Because of the advent of cheap air flights and packaged tours, northern Europeans shifted their tourism from nearby resorts (such as Blackpool in England) to the warmer climes of Spain, Greece, and elsewhere on the Mediterranean. While the Club Meds (self-contained resorts located in North Africa and elsewhere, originating in 1950) appealed primarily to a young and affluent population, especially from France, less elaborately themed resorts on the Mediterranean became very popular by the 1980s, making this broad region the destination of one-third of world tourism by the 1990s. The result was a rise in annual tourist visits to the Mediterranean region from 86 million in 1975 to 200 million in 1990.

Although economic downturns produce temporary declines in vacationing, leisure has become a central activity and perhaps life purpose of many Europeans. This is no surprise considering that the annual hours devoted to work dropped from about 3,000in1900to1,731intheUnitedKingdom, 1,539 in France, and 1,397 in the Netherlands (compared to the 1,957 in the United States) in 1998.

See alsoCinema; Football (Soccer); Television; Tourism .