Why Leisure Time is an Act of Radical Feminist Resistance

I grew up with a father who spent hours every weekend playing golf while my mother sighed, laundry basket under her arm, about never having time to play the piano. Then, when I got married and had children of my own, I continued the tradition. Even now, with my children in their 20s and more time to myself, my leisure goals are simple, and sadly, very American: I try not to work on weekends. 

I’m not alone. At a recent dinner with some women I know, I asked about their leisure time. Most laughed. One shared how her husband spent hours learning ancient Greek while she did the grocery shopping and ferried the children to activities. 

All of which makes the seemingly benign Gen Z social media trend of “hot girl hobbies—think sewing, junk journaling, doing jigsaw puzzles or just reading—actually quite radical. I find hope in the scads of how-to videos and articles about “elegant” hobbies like calligraphy and flower arranging; cozy “grandma” hobbies like knitting and baking; hobbies to keep you in shape like rock climbing; adventurous, quirky hobbies like urban foraging; or hobbies to get the creative juices flowing, like playing with AI- assisted digital art.

A history of hobbies

From the ancient Greeks on, having leisure time has been a sign of living fully, a signal that you have the space to express and experience your truest self, to feel joy and refresh your soul. Yet a culture of leisure has never been accessible to most women. Think of the old adage: a man can work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done. 

Having leisure time has been a sign of living fully, that you have the space to feel joy and refresh your soul. Yet a culture of leisure has never been accessible to most women.

A 2023 Gallup survey found that over the past 20 years, there has been a surge in Americans across every demographic saying that their hobbies and recreational activities are important or extremely important to them, even more so than religion. And no group values their leisure time more than young people, the survey found. In 2001, just 45% of those between the ages of 18 and 34 said their leisure time was important. By 2023, that share had soared to 66%, the highest, by far, of any age group.

Another survey by Civic Science found that Gen Z is most likely of all age groups to spend at least six to 10 hours each week on their hobbies. And though Gallup found that women still lag behind men in terms of valuing their time for leisure, (64% for men vs. 58% for women), the share of women wanting leisure time has increased 13% since 2001.

That increased focus on leisure and hobbies is far more important than it might seem. In fact it’s an act of radical feminist resistance. 

Why read so much into women taking time for hobbies? Because typically we don’t. 

I live in the U.S., a country that valorizes productivity, achievement, hard work, and hustle culture. Indeed, many of the same social media posts on hobbies give advice on how to turn them into exhausting yet profitable side hustles. But taking time for ourselves has always been particularly difficult for women.

Drudge work vs. time to think great thoughts

In the 1899 cultural critique “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” by Thorstein Veblen, the author dismisses women on page two. Leisure, he wrote , was the province of men of privilege. The farther men got from “drudge” work, the higher their status, and the more they could use large blocks of uninterrupted time to think great thoughts, invent, make art, and, one philosopher argued, create culture. The drudge work, Veblen maintained, was done by the servants, the slaves, and “also all the women.”

Since the first release of the annual American Time-Use Survey in 2003, in virtually every age group, men have been shown to enjoy more leisure time than women. The leisure gap is widest between mothers and fathers with young children. Mothers with young children spend nearly 21 hours a week caring for children. That’s eight more hours a week than fathers with young children. 

Men, throughout history, have been expected to work hard and have been rewarded by the shared understanding that they then deserve time to themselves to play hard. Think: entire weekends spent playing golf, (like my dad), hunting, or simply whiling away the hours with buddies at the pub, watching or playing sports, or gaming until late into the night. And they’ve reaped most of the benefits that come with leisure time: New research shows how hobbies improve the quality and even the length of our lives.

The story is different for women. Women are expected to do the caregiving; to put others first. And unlike men, most women, research shows, feel that we don’t deserve leisure or free time, that we have to earn it, usually by taking care of everyone and everything else first. And, in my experience, by the time you’ve done that, any scrap of free time is usually gone.

Most women feel that we don’t deserve leisure or free time, that we have to earn it, usually by taking care of everyone and everything else first.

Instead of following their interests and curiosities, to be considered acceptable, women have tended to spend their “free” time on practical and productive activities done in community, along the lines of quilting bees, sewing circles or joining the PTA. 

“There’s been an invisibility of women’s leisure throughout history. No one talks about it,” says Karla Henderson, a professor emerita at North Carolina State University. 

So for women to now be so openly taking time for fun, joy, hobbies and leisure is a sign, she says, of liberation.“It’s a statement of valuing yourself as a woman.”

Still, while the majority of women and mothers, like men, work outside the home for pay, women, on average, spend 2.34  hours a day on unpaid care and housework, about an hour more than men do. Women not in the paid labor force average about six hours a day on caregiving compared with 2.8 hours for non-working men, a report by the Brookings Institution found. That report also found that men out of the labor force spend nine hours a day on screen and leisure time. Latina women, another report found, do more domestic labor than any other group and twice the unpaid labor as Latino men. 

The second, third and fourth shifts

The Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild was the first to point out in her landmark 1989 book how women come home from paid work to an unpaid “second shift” of work. A new generation of scholars have begun to show how all the mental labor of planning, managing and organizing women that do is an unpaid “third shift.” And I personally consider all the magic women create around the holidays as another unpaid “fourth shift.” Yes, this time and effort is important and it can be meaningful. But it’s still work.

But beyond a gap in the quantity of leisure time between women and men, the quality of leisure time is also different for women, particularly once they start families or take on care responsibilities. (A classic 1990 study was titled: "Women’s Leisure, What Leisure?") Women with care duties have very little of what scholars call “pure” leisure to themselves. Often, their leisure time is spent with children or those they’re caring for. Indeed, early time-use researchers, all of whom were men, initially coded child care time as leisure. As one scholar explained to me, they assumed women were just at home having fun with the kids.

Early researchers coded child care time as leisure. They assumed women were just at home having fun with the kids.

And even when women do have free time, research shows that it has always been and still is interrupted, coming in fits and snatches, which is and often contaminated by worries about to-do lists, planning and organizing, and worrying about everyone else’s emotional wellbeing. That’s  hardly ideal for getting into a flow state, for thinking deeply, or for concentrating on much of anything, for that matter.

Equality in leisure 

On the upside,  recent international research has found that women are more likely to feel entitled to take time to relax when they live in countries with more family-supportive public policies, including access to affordable, high quality child care and paid leave for all parents, and where more women hold elected office. 

Still, that study found that women feel more pressure during leisure time than men no matter where  they live. 

For leisure time to truly feel refreshing, it requires two things: choice and control. “You can do all the studies you want on how much leisure time men and women have. But it’s also about whether you feel you have agency and can freely enjoy your leisure,” said Mara Yerkes,  a professor at the University of Utrecht. 

 Of course, choice and control over time  have always been in short supply for women. That may be why, along with the explosion of Gen Z hobby posts on social media, there are also “Mom Hobby” memes, where women fantasize about just getting some sleep.

And if that’s what our children see,  moms who abandon their hobbies to get a leg up on a mountain of  laundry, as I did, the cycle will continue. 

Stick with it, I yell at the hot girls as their hobby reels flash by in my feeds. Show us how it’s done. I’m finally ready to leave the dirty dishes in the sink, make a stand and show my daughter that, after nearly 50 years, I can still play the piano.