Work and Leisure

74 Judy Whitethemselves in determining what is to be provided on the basis of what theywant, which may not be what policy-makers think they might want.Continuities and divergence: women’s rights toleisure in the 1990sThere has been little empirical feminist research to develop and expand onthe Sheffield study. No research funding agency has seen fit to support studieswhich might broaden and deepen the foundations erected by the Sheffieldstudy. We are left with small-scale, individual or small team projects, fundedby academic institutions, often as part of higher degrees or personal postdoctoralresearch. While meeting the feminist criteria for dealing withpersonal issues, and acknowledging that the researcher brings her own perspectiveand partiality to research, they do not together constitute a largeenough body of work in which to ground or grow effective theory. Nevertheless,contributions have been made to the consolidation and the developmentof feminist leisure theory, including the work of Henderson et al. (1996),Wearing (1998) and Aitchison (2000). In particular, links have been madewith recent debates and developments in feminist theory generally, such asthe sociology of the body and poststructuralism and postcolonial theory.An example of such small-scale, but valuable, research, self-described as‘exploratory’, is that done by Tess Kay in 1997 with eleven women in highstatus,full-time jobs and with one or more pre-school children. Many ofthese women identified the extent to which gendered inequality resurfacedwith the coming of children, when women’s unpaid labour increaseddisproportionately to those of their (male) partners. Kay found that:whilst this group of women stayed in full time employment, they had toadjust their work involvement, adopting informal strategies to reduceand contain paid work to accommodate the increased demands ofmotherhood. Male partners made little or no comparable changes.Therefore, within the household, although both parents continued to becategorised as full-time employed, women’s practical and emotionalcommitment to paid work was perceived as lower than men’s.(Kay 1998: 1)She suggests that this divergence is pivotal in reintroducing traditionalgender stereotypes to dual-earner households on the basis of the highersocietal value accorded the paid work in which the male partner’s roleis rooted.This research focused on a group of women which is becoming larger andmore widespread: not just women with young children and working full-time,but who are doing so in employment areas which require considerable qualifications,training and ‘presence’ in the workplace. Previously, women who