Work and Leisure

Gender, work and leisure 69I believed that each generation should produce its own statement ofproblems and priorities, and that I had no special authority or vocationto speak on behalf of women of any but my own age, class, backgroundand education . . . it was not until feminists of my own generation beganto assert with apparent seriousness that feminism had gone too far thatthe fire rose up in my belly. When lifestyle feminists chimed in thatfeminism had gone far enough in giving them the right to ‘have it all’, i.e.money, sex, and fashion, it would have been inexcusable to remain silent.(Greer 1999: 2)The 1999 book may be more measured in its anger, but it is as clear as in the1970 book that women still have to struggle to be considered on their ownterms and in their own right as people and individuals, with values and beliefswhich are not conditional on their status in relationship to men. As early‘second-wave’ feminists, we had to learn how to work with different groups ofpeople and, painfully, to acknowledge that there were differences in what wefelt we wanted and how we might achieve it. We might have agreed that wewere oppressed and undervalued, and that this was a condition of theWestern industrialised world, but there were disagreements about the extentto which this was a reflection of the lack of women in positions of power andinfluence in organisations outside the home (roughly the liberal view); thedomination of capital systems (Marxist); women not receiving their rightfulshare of resources (socialist); or of women positioning themselves in relationto men rather than to each other and their own independent networks andpower relations (radical).If diagnoses were different, so were prognoses and possible ways in whichchange might be brought about, and to what ends. While these differenceswere inevitable (if there was acceptance of the belief that there is muchdiversity between women themselves), it also made it extremely difficult tomanage the processes of changing attitudes towards women and the intellectualdebates and theoretical developments to underpin these changes.Indeed, as Greer suggests, although academic feminists did all that their malecolleagues did to gain power and prestige through attempts to make the studyof gender respectable, few women won the glittering prizes.This chapter unfolds from the personal to the political, and back again. Init I try to weave threads and join them together, using work which I considerprovides essential signposts, to be outstanding epistemologically and to havemethodological rigour and ethical robustness in the development of feministapproaches to leisure and gender research and theory. So the chapter startswith an exploration of the ‘new’ epistemologies of feminism which haveemerged and been battled over since the 1960s, and then the impact of thenew methods of inquiry which such epistemologies have engendered. The twosections following these discussions lay out the foundations of theoreticaldiscussions from the 1970s and the consequences of undertaking research in