Work and Leisure

76 Judy Whiteonly five minutes, that’s for them, but fellas will say, well sorry, I’ve beento work, I’m going to the gym now.(Kay 1998: 14)Kay’s conclusion is clear: as a consequence of the ways in which men invest intheir personal leisure time and energy, together with their limited effectivenessin the home, it is inevitable that working mothers have a disproportionateburden, ‘and it was women’s ability to sustain this burden, howeverreluctantly, that allowed household activity patterns to remain so inequitable’(Kay 1998: 14). Overall, Kay concluded that the full-time employed motherremained highly committed to her work, but was frequently forced, commonlydue to the intransigence of her partner to change his working patterns,to contain work within fewer hours and to reduce the range of activitiescontingent upon it, which appeared to give messages to employers about thedepth of their commitment, whether the women liked it or not: ‘Parenthoodbecame a site of gender differentiation in work behaviour, despite women’scommitment to employment’ (Kay 1998: 14).At home, women carried out more household tasks and more childcare tasksthan their partners did and felt that they had overall responsibility for runningthe home. The unequal share of childcare tasks was especially important inbringing about a reduction in their work time. Women were very conscious thatdomestic demands were unequally shared with their partners, but had greatdifficulty in achieving more equitable divisions of labour within the home andshowed awareness of the influence of broader social expectations affecting this.The differentiation in work and home roles was repeated in leisure: womenrecognised their own needs for leisure but this did not in itself give them astrong enough sense of entitlement to override other demands.These findings suggest that even those women with relatively highemployment status could not pose a substantial challenge to the traditionalgendered distinctions in couples’ lifestyles. The arrival of children seems to bethe signal for the emergence, or re-emergence, of stereotypical divisions ofresponsibility, with women taking on ‘parenting’ roles much more positivelythan their partners, whose behaviour changes minimally, and only marginallyin the direction of childcare.The depressing and alarming feelings come from the association of thesefindings with the rate and directions of change. The term used by Hochschild(1990) is ‘stalled revolution’, in which women have entered the workplace atall levels and in all types of jobs, but neither men in the workplace nor theculture have adjusted to the new realities.Leisure and feminist theory and practice in 2000In an essay in Feminist Theory, entitled, ‘But the empress has no clothes!Some awkward questions about the missing revolution in feminist theory’,