The Sheffield study of gender and leisure: its methodological approach

Women, gender, leisure and place: towards a more ‘humanistic’ geography of women's leisure

“…In contrast, the number of men in full-time employment shows less spatial variation, ranging from 80-90%, reflecting local structural unemployment variations. Research on women's leisure has shown a strong relationship between employment status and leisure opportunities (Deem, 1982;Woodward et al, 1988) and, therefore, one would expect these spatial variations in the gender divisions of labour to be reproduced in local patterns of leisure behaviour. Walton (1981), for example, described how a long tradition of relatively high levels of female full-time waged labour in north western England helped to stimulate the development of the annual family seaside holiday among mill workers in the region, long before the practice became common in other industrial regions where full-time female waged labour was less common.…”

The Sociology of Gender and Leisure in Britain—Past Progress and Future Prospects

“…Much of the research on women and leisure has used qualitative, often ethnographic, methods, as for example in Westwood's (1984) study of white and Asian factory workers and Wimbush's (1986;) work on young mothers and their leisure. But larger studies have also used survey techniques to advantage, in combination with qualitative methods (Woodward et al, 1988;. The realisation that it may be possible to use quantitative methods and data for feminist research as well as qualitative data, has been only slowly and reluctantly considered by many British feminist researchers, even though in other areas of the social sciences the old, rather stereotyped divisions between the two, which see quantitative work as positivistic and ignoring subjectivity and qualititative work as being overconcerned with meaning at the expense of generalisability and reliability, are being dissolved.…”

Feminist and gender perspectives in tourism studies

“…Feminist research began to emerge in tourism studies' sister subject field of leisure studies from the late 1970s and grew significantly during the 1980s with a series of extensive empirical research projects that sought to explore women's tourist studies 5:3 participation and constraints in leisure (Talbot, 1979;Deem, 1986;Green et al, 1987;Woodward et al, 1988;Henderson et al, 1989). However, it was not until the early 1990s that tourism studies really embraced feminist epistemology as a legitimate research perspective (Kinnaird and Hall, 1994;Swain, 1995;Sinclair, 1997).…”

“…The influence of socialist feminism is evident throughout the major case studies of women's leisure undertaken in the UK in the 1980s and referred to earlier.There seems little doubt that the majority of previous feminist research tourist studies 5:3 in leisure studies has viewed class relations as a major determinant of leisure relations. For example, Woodward et al (1988) listed six determinants of women's leisure, with the first three emphasizing the influence of social class: 'the most significant influences on women's leisure were their social class, level of household and personal income, employment status, age group, marital status and stage in the family life cycle' (p. 99). Although these major feminist studies of leisure conducted in the 1980s undoubtedly disrupted the discourse of leisure studies, with their emphasis on the standpoint of social class, they can also be viewed as part of the dominant discourse of leisure studies, particularly in the UK where sociology and socialist analyses have held sway over other disciplinary perspectives and standpoints (Aitchison, 2000a).…”