leisure

Dictionary: lei·sure (lē'zhər, lĕzh'ər) pronunciation

Freedom from time-consuming duties, responsibilities, or activities.

idiom:

at (one's) leisure

When one has free time; at one's convenience: I'll return the call at my leisure.

[Middle English, from Norman French leisour, from Old French leisir, to be permitted, from Latin licēre.]

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World of the Body: leisure

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The release of the body from the tension and strain of work may be understood as a natural physical response to fatigue. Yet relaxation as a regulated right of human labour in the Western world emerged only in the nineteenth century, and ever since has been repeatedly checked by anxieties about mass leisure and by the dynamics of economic growth.

Many cultures share a 7-day cycle of 6-days' work with one day's rest and societies break up routinized labour with festivals. In medieval Europe, 100 holidays per year was common. Over time, holidays were extended with the addition, for example, of half-day ‘preparations’ preceding feast days. Workdays varied in length with daylight, weather, and the task to be done. The average was probably about 10 hours. As late as the eighteenth century, economists assumed that workers would work less if given increased wages, preferring more leisure to higher incomes.

Yet this image of a pre-industrial ‘leisure ethic’ must be qualified. Most festivals corresponded to lulls in seasonal work cycles, usually tied to agriculture. This explains, for example, the long season of holidays between October and February. Even holidays like midsummer (late June) and the English Wakes' Week (August) coincided with breaks in the farming work cycle. These holidays did not conform to the need of the body for rest. And many work-free saints' days and even Sunday were more of a privilege than a right, bestowed on the skilled and politically powerful urban male trades.

The growth of markets and mechanized production gradually undermined the traditional leisure culture but also established conditions for regular relaxation as a right. Religious reformers attacked both the length and unruly practices of festivals like Mardi Gras, especially from the second half of the sixteenth century. During the 1650s, English Puritans attempted to replace the irregular festival calendar with the weekly and subdued Sabbath rest. The attempt of the first French Republic in 1793 to create a 10-day week to replace the ‘Christian’ 7-day week and festival calender was merely an extreme example of a common effort of market-oriented reformers to increase the regularity of work. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, long festival seasons (like the week between Christmas and New Year) were reduced to single holidays. Employers also suppressed the informal practice among mostly privileged male trades of ‘Saint Monday’ — extending the Sunday rest into Monday. By the 1820s, by taking advantage of gas lighting, employers lengthened workdays in textile factories to 12 and 14 hours. They increased working hours in order to meet competition and to make efficient use of expensive machinery.

The demands of a market/mechanized economy for a more disciplined workforce led élites to attack the anarchic character of much of festival leisure. They opposed the release of physical and psychological tensions in bursts of boisterous play (drinking, gambling, and violent sport) that was common in the festival play of the popular classes. Wealthy English gradually withdrew their patronage of local festivals and even blocked access to popular sports fields and walking paths. Authorities outlawed violent, chaotic inter-village sporting matches and tried to license ale houses and other drinking places in hopes of reducing gambling, blood sports like cock fighting, and too-ready access to drink.

By the 1830s, more positive notions of relaxation were beginning to appear when reformers (doctors, clergy, politicians, and even some factory owners) began to recognize the social, biological, and cultural costs of overwork. The revival of the Anglo-American Sabbatarian movement was an attempt to prevent work and the market from invading the sanctity of Sunday rest and religious observance. And by the 1850s, factory owners in Britain were beginning to grant women workers a Saturday half-holiday in hopes that this would give them time to shop and clean in anticipation of a restful family Sunday.

In the 1830s and 1840s, reformers found the increased intensity, regularity, and length of worktime in mechanized textile jobs to threaten the education and growth of children. Long, exhausting hours for women seemed to undermine the female's ‘duty’ to produce children and to care for the family. These concerns culminated in the English 10-hour day law of 1847 for women and children in textile factories. American and European employers and governments only grudgingly granted the right to leisure, applying it in stages, first to children, then to women, and then to men in dangerous or especially fatiguing trades (like mining).

Victorian reformers also promoted new forms of leisure in ‘rational recreation’. The ideal was a leisure designed to restore the body, improve the mind, and compensate for the loss of domestic life due to the separation of work from home caused by industrialization. Among its many forms were the public parks intended to encourage family promenades on Sundays, the home-like atmospheres of YMCA reading rooms, and even ‘rationalized’ sports like soccer controlled by strict rules and referees that minimized injury and violence.

These ideas about recreation emerged from the middle classes. Although they trickled down to labourers, working-class leisure retained many aspects of the traditional festival culture. Rational recreation was best expressed in the suburban ideal of the bourgeois family home that had clearly emerged by 1850. There, parlour board games, oral reading of new family magazines, and outdoor sports like croquet could bind the family, sheltered from the disorder of the urban crowds.

Despite the success of the Ten-Hour Law, intellectual and business élites continued to fear that a legal limit to the workday would force businesses into costly investments in machinery and inventory, make industry less competitive in expanding markets, and undermine employers' social control over workers. Late Victorian and early twentieth-century intellectuals like Le Bon, Durkheim, and Freud were obsessed that freedom from work would unleash the passions of urban crowds.

Still others argued that regular relaxation should be a fruit of increased productivity and a necessity of more intense work. Scientific management, pioneered by the American Frederick Taylor in the 1890s, found that new pay and work methods and reorganized factories could increase individual output and make it possible to reduce daily working hours. Especially after 1912, trade unionists and reformers proposed a trade off of more intense and strictly managed work for an 8-hour workday. Beginning with Herman von Helmholtz in the 1860s, scientists began to understand the working body as a ‘motor’ with a measurable capacity for work and the need for regularly spaced rest. This concept challenged the view that the natural ‘laziness’ of workers could be overcome only by applying external discipline. Work scientists like Angelo Mosso believed that output could be optimized if exhaustion was avoided. Overwork reduced longevity, decreased fertility, stunted the growth of youth, produced insomnia and nervousness, and encouraged alcoholism and torpor. Efficiency in the human motor required daily and weekly rest breaks and even regularly spaced rests within the workday. The sophistication of work science grew during World War I, providing a powerful support for the 8-hour, 6-day week which became common in 1919.

In the 1930s, Western European workers won an annual paid holiday and Americans won a 2-day weekend. After World War II, these reductions made possible working-class tourism (especially in Europe) and suburbanization (especially in the US). In the postwar generation, a ‘perfect’ balance of work and leisure seem to have been achieved in the US, ideally based on wage-earning husbands working 40 hours a week supported by a homemaking wife in the suburbs.

Since the 1970s, complex economic and social trends have reversed the historical trend toward increased leisure time. Increased speed of communications and transport along with the rise of global competition have created the 24-hour economy and, with it, work at all hours. Economic maximizing and consumerism have induced workers not only to opt for overtime but to choose timesaving devices to aid in their leisure. This has meant a saturation of free time with leisure goods and their maintenance, thus creating what Staffan Linder calls a ‘harried leisure class’ of consumers. Decline in the rates of growth in the West from the 1970s and the rise of the Pacific Rim economies, where leisure time still does not match Western standards, has weakened the influence of Western labour and efforts to reduce worktime. The more than doubling of the rate of married women in the workforce since the war (from 25% to 61% between 1950 and 1981 in Britain) has undermined the domestic culture upon which family leisure was formerly based and has created serious pressures on women to stretch time between wage and caring work. Many two-income couples, especially those unable to purchase personal services, have experienced a ‘domestic speedup’ when the traditional realms of personal life — family care and leisure — are crammed into shorter periods of the week. Relaxation is an elusive goal, despite the increases in productivity that should make it attainable for all.

— Gary Cross

History

Detail from Rest (1896). Charles Sprague Pearce, Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.

The word leisure comes from the Latin word licere, meaning “to be permitted” or “to be free,” via Old French leisir, and first appeared in the early fourteenth century.^[2] The notions of leisure and leisure time are thought to have emerged in Victorian Britain in the late nineteenth century, late in the Industrial Revolution. Early factories required workers to perform long shifts, often up to eighteen hours per day, with only Sundays off work. By the 1870s though, more efficient machinery and the emergence of trade unions resulted in decreases in working hours per day, and allowed industrialists to give their workers Saturdays as well as Sundays off work.

Affordable and reliable transport in the form of railways allowed urban workers to travel on their days off, with the first package holidays to seaside resorts appearing in the 1870s, a trend which spread to industrial nations in Europe and North America. As workers channeled their wages into leisure activities, the modern entertainment industry (beginning with the film industry) emerged in industrialized nations, catering to entertain workers on their days off. This Victorian concept—the weekend—heralded the beginning of leisure time as it is known today.

Definitions

There are many different definitions of leisure. One popular social psychological theory of leisure was put forward by psychology professor John Neulinger in the early 1970s. Neulinger defined leisure using three criteria:^[3]

The experience is a state of mind.
It must be entered into voluntarily.
It must be intrinsically motivating of its own merit.

Other theories abound. Sebastian de Grazia portrayed leisure as a form of contemplation. Seppo Iso-Ahola adapted a form of optimal arousal to explain leisure. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory is another popular definition of leisure.

Types of leisure

Active leisure activities involve the exertion of physical or mental energy. Low-impact physical activities include walking and yoga, which expend little energy and have little contact or competition. High-impact activities such as kick-boxing and football consume much energy and are competitive. Some active leisure activities involve almost no physical activity, but do require a substantial mental effort, such as playing chess or painting a picture. Active leisure and recreation overlap significantly.

Passive leisure activities are those in which a person does not exert any significant physical or mental energy, such as going to the cinema, watching television, or gambling on slot machines. Some leisure experts discourage these types of leisure activity, on the grounds that they do not provide the benefits offered by active leisure activities. For example, acting in a community drama (an active leisure activity) could build a person's skills or self-confidence. Nevertheless, passive leisure activities are a good way of relaxing for many people.

Examples of leisure activities

People who work indoors and spend most of their time sitting and doing sedentary office work can add physical activity to their lives by doing sports during their leisure time, such as playing a ball game, going camping, hiking or fishing. On the other hand, people whose jobs involve a lot of physical activity may prefer to spend their free time doing quiet, relaxing activities, such as reading books or magazines or watching TV. Some people find that collecting stamps, postcards, badges, model cars,planes or ships, bottles, or antiques are relaxing hobbies.

Free time is organized in many schools and institutions. Schools may offer many extracurricular activities including hobby groups, sports activities, and choirs. Other institutions such as retirement homes and hospitals also offer activities such as clubs and meetings for playing games or simply organized periods for conversation.

Most people enjoy socializing with friends for dinner or a drink after a hard day at work. For many young people, having a regular night out a week is a normal part of their free time, whether it is joining friends for a drink in a pub, dining out in a restaurant, watching a film, playing video games or dancing at a club.

Some people do leisure activities that also have a longer-term goal. In some cases, people do a leisure activity that they hope to turn into a full-time activity (e.g., volunteer paramedics who hope to eventually become professional paramedics). Many people also study part-time in evening university or college courses, both for the love of learning, and to help their career prospects.

Cultural differences

Men relaxing in a cafe overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Time for leisure varies from one society to the next, although anthropologists have found that hunter-gatherers tend to have significantly more leisure time than people in more complex societies. As a result, band societies such as the Shoshone of the Great Basin came across as extraordinarily lazy to European colonialists.^[4]

Capitalist societies often view active leisure activities positively, because active leisure activities require the purchase of equipment and services, which stimulates the economy. Capitalist societies often accord greater status to members who have more wealth. One of the ways that wealthy people can choose to spend their money is by having additional leisure time.

Workaholics are those who work compulsively at the expense of other activities. They prefer to work rather than spend time socializing and engaging in other leisure activities. Many see this as a necessary sacrifice to attain high-ranking corporate positions. Increasing attention, however, is being paid to the effects of such imbalance upon the worker and the family.

Throughout its early history, American society has been described as driven by the Protestant work ethic, a cultural view that is said to be inspired by the Protestant preacher John Calvin.

References

^ Goodin, Robert E.; Rice, James Mahmud; Bittman, Michael; & Saunders, Peter. (2005). "The time-pressure illusion: Discretionary time vs free time". Social Indicators Research 73 (1), 43–70. (PDF file)
^ The “u” first appeared in the early sixteenth century, probably by analogy with words such as pleasure.[1]
^ Neulinger, John. 1981. The Psychology of Leisure. 2nd Ed. C.C. Thomas. ISBN 0398044929
^ Farb, Peter (1968). Man's Rise to Civilization As Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State. New York City: E. P. Dutton. pp. 28. LCC E77.F36. "Most people assume that the members of the Shoshone band worked ceaselessly in an unremitting search for sustenance. Such a dramatic picture might appear confirmed by an erroneous theory almost everyone recalls from schooldays: A high culture emerges only when the people have the leisure to build pyramids or to create art. The fact is that high civilization is hectic, and that primitive hunters and collectors of wild food, like the Shoshone, are among the most leisured people on earth."

External links

Look up leisure, spare time, or free time in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Peter Burke, The invention of leisure in early modern Europe, Past & Present, Feb, 1995
The Development of Leisure Amongst the Social Classes During the Industrial Revolution
See here for a longer bibliography of the subject
The Serious Leisure Perspective [2]

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Misspellings: leisure

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Common misspelling(s) of leisure

liesure

Translations: Leisure

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - fritid, god tid, otium

idioms:

at leisure have god tid, have fri
leisure activities fritidsaktiviteter, fritidsbeskæftigelse
leisure centre fritidscenter
leisure time fritid

Nederlands (Dutch)
vrije tijd, vrijetijdsbesteding, ontspanning

Français (French)
n. - loisirs, temps libre

idioms:

at leisure à l'occasion, sans se presser, à tête reposée
leisure activities loisirs
leisure centre centre de loisirs
leisure time loisirs, temps libre

Deutsch (German)
n. - Freizeit, Muße

idioms:

at leisure in Ruhe
leisure activities Freizeitbeschäftigung
leisure centre Freizeitzentrum
leisure time Freizeit

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - αργία, σχόλη, άνεση (κν. ραχάτι), ελεύθερος χρόνος, ελεύθερη ώρα

idioms:

at leisure ελεύθερος, εύκαιρος
leisure activities δραστηριότητες του ελεύθερου χρόνου μας
leisure centre κέντρο αναψυχής
leisure time ελεύθερος χρόνος

Italiano (Italian)
tempo libero

idioms:

at leisure con comodo
leisure centre centro di svaghi

Português (Portuguese)
n. - lazer (m), descanso (m)

idioms:

at leisure desocupado, com calma
leisure centre centro de lazer
leisure time tempo disponível, diversão

Русский (Russian)
досуг, отдых

idioms:

at leisure на досуге
leisure centre центр отдыха и развлечений
leisure time свободное время

Español (Spanish)
n. - ocio, tiempo libre

idioms:

at leisure estar desocupado, libre, ocioso
leisure activities actividades del ocio
leisure centre polideportivo, centro deportivo
leisure time ratos libres, ocio

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - ledighet, fritid, frihet, lägligt tillfälle, tid, god tid

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
空闲, 悠闲, 闲暇

idioms:

at leisure 空闲着, 从容地
leisure activities 业余活动
leisure centre 业余活动中心, 康乐中心, 休闲中心
leisure time 业余时间的

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 空閒, 悠閒, 閒暇

idioms:

at leisure 空閒著, 從容地
leisure activities 業餘活動
leisure centre 業餘活動中心, 康樂中心, 休閒中心
leisure time 業餘時間的

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 여가, 틈, 안일, 한가한 시간

idioms:

at leisure 한가한 시간이 있는 , 서두르지 않고

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 暇, 余暇, レジャー
adv. - 暇なときに, ゆっくりと

idioms:

at leisure ひまで, 手があいて, のんびりと
leisure activities レジャー活動
leisure centre レジャーセンター
leisure time 暇な時間

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) فراغ أو وقت الفراغ, خلو من العمل, راحه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮פנאי, הנאה בזמן הפנאי‬

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		Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more
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leisure

Contents

History

Definitions

Types of leisure

Examples of leisure activities

Cultural differences

See also

References

Further reading

External links