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Rudy Koshar
concerned about limiting or attacking the beachheads constructed in daily life
outside the workplace by consumer industries. Among Victorian “recreationists,”
such efforts included not only consideration of the content of leisure but also the
design of recreational spaces, from the home to seaside resort, to ensure that certain
proper forms of leisure took place while others were marginalized. 16
Significantly, gender history has dealt with the issue of leisure-consumption
only gingerly. Although social history recognized the gender division of labor as
a constitutive element of working-class experience, the gender division of
consumption has received much less scholarly attention. One concern was that
scholars, by studying women as purchasers of commodities, would reproduce
regnant cultural assumptions about women’s allegedly proper (and secondary)
status as consumers rather than producers. There are of course now classic
accounts of women as consumers in US and British society. 17 Such scholarship is
less prevalent but by no means absent in the social and cultural history of the
Europe. But a recent excellent volume on consumption and gender identity reveals
how much more remains to be done in this genre. 18 Several of the chapters in
Histories of Leisure touch on women’s history, but this is not our primary focus.
In contrast to most recent scholarship, however, there is considerable evidence here
for a more explicit and focused history of masculinity as it relates to spectatorship,
travel, clothing, drinking, and smoking. Compared to the historiography of
women’s consumption, only partially developed as it may be, the topic of men’s
leisure-time consumption is both understudied and undertheorized. 19
Individual, class, and gender identities have been linked in scholarship to the
history of leisure and consumption, but national identities have received much
less explicit attention in this regard. Victoria De Grazia’s seminal analyses of
“bourgeois” and “Fordist” modes of consumption imply, but do not explicitly
address, the question of whether or how national communities gain a sense of
collective selfhood through patterns of leisure shaped by the act of purchasing
commodities and services. The relatively less developed nature of scholarship on
this topic has to do in part with the inattention with which historians have treated
the national state’s role in promoting, regulating, or dampening consumption in
its subject population. 20 Scholarship on the United States’ cultural impact on
Europe – and on European responses to “Americanization” – is perhaps one of
the most promising areas of research on the national dimensions of consumption. 21
Popular sport 22 , from soccer matches to skiing 23 , offers a rich area of research on
leisure’s role in the building of national identities. Such research remains rather
scattered and unfocused for historians of late modern Europe, however, and some
of it takes the national dimension for granted. What precisely is the relationship
between individual or group patterns of consumption and national culture? When
do national or state imperatives shape consumption choices, and how? Do chances
for the expression of national differences through consumption increase or
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