ABSTRACT
Sociologists tend to divide people’s lives into ‘work’ (paid employment), ‘leisure’ (the time when people choose what they want to do) and ‘obligation time’ (periods of sleep, eating and other necessary activities). Feminists have pointed out that this model reflects a male view of the world and does not necessarily fit the experiences of the majority of women. This is partly because unremunerated domestic labour is not recognised as work – it is ‘hidden’ labour – and partly because many women participate in few leisure activities outside of the home. This is because, as we noted in Chapter 6, women and girls have the major responsibility for domestic labour. Whilst men do more paid work than women, they also have more leisure time. It is not only the organisation of work that is gendered but also the cultural values with which paid work and domestic labour are associated; paid work and the workplace are largely seen as men’s domain, the household as women’s. Rosemary Pringle sums up some of these issues when she points out that,
Though home and private life may be romanticized, they are generally held to represent the ‘feminine’ world of the personal and the emotional, the concrete and the particular, of the domestic and the sexual. The public world of work sets itself up as the opposite of all these things: it is rational, abstract, ordered, concerned with general principles, and of course, masculine. . . . For men, home and work are both opposite and complementary. . . . [For women] home is not a respite from work but another workplace. For some women work is actually a respite from home!
