Leisure Time

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Leisure Time

Despite the persistent complaints Americans make about not having enough free time, the twentieth century ushered in an unprecedented age of leisure. Economic developments, like the decreased work week, increased wages, and increased productivity brought more free time to workers, and the changing attitudes toward leisure are a reflection of the greater role that free time plays in American life. The shift in attitudes are subtle and sweeping, their significance barely noticed by most. The free time that allows for "the newfound delight of young fathers in their babies," wrote Margaret Mead in 1957, represented "another intrinsically rewarding pattern which no large civilization has ever permitted." The observation is at once a measure of the unprecedented role of leisure in everyday life, and how much Americans take their free time for granted.

Twentieth-century America's preoccupation with leisure time represents an enormous change from the attitudes held by Americans settlers, who cleared their land and farmed it for subsistence. Primarily agrarian, early nineteenth-century Americans found that most of their time was consumed by agricultural work. Those who loafed beyond what was socially acceptable found themselves ostracized within their small, agrarian communities. Places of entertainment, such as theaters, were regarded as dens of vice that were populated by drunk actors and prostitutes. But in pre-industrial America, leisure and work often commingled. As Roy Rosenzweig observed in Rethinking Popular Culture, "the rum barrell (sic) was always near the work—ready for distribution, by this means they kept the men hard at work all day." The prevailing mindset was exemplified by Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard's Almanac: "Leisure, is Time for doing something useful … Trouble springs from Idleness, and grievous Toil from needless Ease. "

The advent of industrialization brought changes to the workplace, Mechanization, the specialization of labor, and the regulation of the workplace made the workplace strictly a place for labor. Drinking, for example, was banished to the saloon. These sharp delineations led to the recognition that free time had value and that how one spent one's free time had significance. Middle-class reformers, who took issue with the rowdy, hard-drinking, working-class culture, began to view industrialism as a potential wedge that could come between workers and a more meaningful culture. "When the operation of the machine tends to relieve the operative of all thought, the man or woman who tends it risks becoming a machine, well oiled and cared for, but incapable of independent life," worried industrialist Edward Atkinson. Americans slowly began to realize that overwork could be as destructive as idleness, and that a useful pursuit of leisure could be beneficial.

The pursuit of leisure had been defined as an upper-class privilege by Thorstein Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899. Veblen introduced the phrase "conspicuous consumption" to describe leisure as "a non-productive consumption of time." Leisure was associated with pursuits that did not contribute to making a living, and the notion of "culture" tied such pursuits to higher aims—the arts, religion and higher education. As the middle class grew in the early twentieth century, its definitions of culture and leisure reflected their emphasis on hierarchical order. The polarization between rich and poor gave the growing middle class impetus to create a social role for culture that distinguished the status-seeking middle class from the working and immigrant classes below it.

After World War II, the idea of "earned" pleasure—free time as a reward for hard work—began to break down. According to Margaret Mead, Americans sought to restore an equilibrium that had been disrupted by the hardships of war and the wartime separation of men and women. Soldiers had too little leave time, and war workers had too much disposable income. The desire to get some joy out of life superseded all else, and the home became the place where Americans sought that joy. Americans began to reconceive the relationship between work and family life. "As once it was wrong to play so hard that it might affect one's work," writes Mead, "now it is wrong to work so hard that it may affect family life."

The emergence of a distinct youth culture during the 1950s helped define some leisure activities. Around the time of World War I, few considered adolescence a separate stage of life. The term "teenager" did not come into common use until the 1940s. Prior to the 1950s, teenagers had been expected to work full time, like adults. Most adolescents worked by age 15, moving from childhood straight into adulthood. But with the increasing opportunities for secondary education in the 1920s, and a lack of available work during the Depression, American children found that their adulthood was postponed. The postwar prosperity of the 1950s brought fatter allowances to teenagers and this new demographic group became a target market. Entire industries retooled their operations to meet the needs of these indiscriminate consumers, flush with disposable income. This development transformed twentieth-century popular culture, as new icons like Elvis Presley became cultural phenomena, and encouraged the purchase of rock 'n' roll concert tickets, trendy clothes, and long-playing records.

In addition to the prosperity of the times, technological changes—like the television and the movies—changed the leisure experience into a consumptive one for adults as well as teenagers. Leisure expenditures in 1950 had increased tenfold from those in 1909, when Americans were likely to make their own music or toys. Correspondingly, the average work-week dropped from 12 hours a day in 1900 to 7.5 in 1960, as increased productivity helped to shrink working time. By the end of the century, it would be possible to speak of a "leisure industry."

Whereas work was once the primary identifier for individuals, leisure has become more and more central to identity. In the introduction to an issue entitled "Americans at Play," Life magazine wrote in 1971:

The weekend is a state of mind, betrayed by a vacantstare that lasts till Tuesday and an anticipatory twitchingthat begins on Thursday. We talk fishing at the factory, surfing at the store, skiing in the office, and when we make new acquaintances, we identify ourselves less by what we do for a living than by what we do to loaf … Wherever we are, inside our head, we're out there.

Nothing could slow Americans' appetite for leisure time activities: "Leisure spending rose on a steady curve through Vietnam, an oil embargo, runaway inflation, an energy crisis, unemployment and a recession." According to Mark Jury in Playtime! Americans at Leisure, leisure spending increased from $58 billion in 1965 to $160 billion in 1977. Though obviously fueled by factors like lower working hours, higher wages, and earlier retirement, the leisure spending also represented a willful reorganization of personal priorities. Jury indicated that leisure products, like boats, that were once only available to the wealthy could now be purchased, through extended financing, by the middle class. Leisure had become one of the great American levelers.

People not only reorganized their priorities for spending money for leisure activities, but also reorganized their work to accommodate their desire for leisure time. Though the more prosperous middle-class workers had less time to devote to leisure activities than their working-class counterparts, and the income gap widened in favor of college degree holders, the rise of the service economy provided an alternative for many. The service economy enabled a number of Americans, many of them college-educated, to work when they needed to as bartenders, waitresses, or hairdressers, and make an above-average income from tips. Free time was no longer available only to the rich. The service economy offered modest incomes and flexible working hours that provided workers the time and the money to pursue leisure activities. Jury describes one so-called "leisure freak":

(Pete) decided to give up acting and enroll in a school to become a hairdresser … a good hairdresser in Los Angeles could make twelve thousand dollars a year (including tips) [1977 dollars] by working three days a week. The other four days were then free to pursue a current passion—skydiving, bodybuilding, motorcycle racing, anything. His entire crowd lived for their leisure activities.

As more and more Americans participated in leisure time, the very definition of leisure came into question. Instead of encompassing all time away from work, leisure has been defined as "doing something" enjoyable. Leisure has evolved into the time in which one is free, apart from others. The phrase "quality time," so often used in respect to the family, implies that the time spent together isn't as important as the amount of effort put into that time. Its use also indicates the diminished focus of leisure time within the family. In the 1990s fewer Americans were married than in the previous generation, and fewer still were parents, as many put off parenthood for a longer period.

Despite these trends, Americans in the 1990s remained largely home-centered. A March 1999 Gallup Poll reported that watching television was the favorite way to spend an evening for 31 percent of the respondents. Television watching has been the top response on this poll since 1960, though the poll has reported demographic differences in the responses. For example, watching television is much more popular with those 65 and older than with the 18-29 segment. Educational differences also prompt different responses: college or postgraduate degree holders are more involved in reading or dining out, while less educated people prefer television. "As our leisure time has increased since 1965," Geoffrey Godbey told the Christian Science Monitor, "the gain has been plowed into more TV because it can be sequenced, an hour here, an hour and a half there. TV fits so well now, and it is immediately accessible."

But in the face of increased free time, Americans in the 1990s complain that they have less of it. Their complaints constitute a healthy debate among those involved in leisure studies (a field of sociological inquiry that in itself indicates the prominence of leisure in American life). One plausible explanation for this discrepancy emerges in the concept of "time-deepening," which "assumes that, under pressure of expanded interest and compulsion, people are capable of higher rates of 'doing'." John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey described this conception in their book Time for Life, and based their study upon "time diaries," in which study groups recorded how they spent their free time. Time-deepening is the sense of being rushed, either a sense that is self-imposed, or perceived. Management at work is geared scientifically toward making the workplace run at its optimal efficiency. Our sports are "measured, timed, specialized, and synchronized," say Robinson and Godbey. It's not enough to go to the live event: we need portable radios to listen to the broadcast of the live event. Fans tailgate before football games, with grills scattered throughout the stadium parking lot, making it hard to tell anymore if the leisure is the game, or the impromptu party before the game.

Like the phrase "quality time," Americans have come to act as if the time spent is not as important as how much has been extracted from that time. We read and watch television. We admonish each other to "get to the point" in conversation, as if taking too long is wrong in itself. Technology has made us more accessible to each other than ever before, but it sometimes seems that we spend more time trying to get in touch with each other, leaving endless messages on machines, than we actually spend in direct communication.

The modern explosion of leisure implies that one should feel a certain amount of guilt for enjoying work too much. Researchers like Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre suggest that an imbalance in favor of leisure is no more desirable than a reverse imbalance favoring work:

If people realized that their jobs were more exciting and fulfilling than they had thought, they could disregard the cultural mandate against enjoying work and find in it a satisfaction that at present seems to be denied by the fact that people think of it as obligatory.

The Information Age will likely change much about how leisure is defined. If more workers telecommute from home, will work appear less regimented and therefore feel less like work? Americans' views of recreation may also have to adjust to a new conception of work. The likelihood will be that these shifts will occur seamlessly, as many think about their free time only in the terms of what they will do with it.

—Daryl Umberger