ABSTRACT
The National Lottery is an important part of contemporary capitalist culture, and can be understood using early critiques of popular culture. This chapter demonstrates that participation in the National Lottery is both a classed and gendered activity. It also examines how it is that working class women are able to participate in the National Lottery, within the contradictory discourses, and within the confines of often-hostile attitudes to gambling. National Lottery play should be seen, both as a leisure activity in which working class women participate because of the ideological and material constraints on their everyday lives, but also as an activity which they have adopted in order to create a pleasurable leisure space of their own. Researcher Jan Pahls found that for low income families, women tend to be in control of finances, whereas for higher income families or where the husband is the only earner, he is more likely to control or manage the finances.
