Women, leisure and familism: relationships and isolation in small town Canada

Abstract

In this paper, a study of a hinterland community in British Columbia serves to raise two kinds of questions about constraints on women's leisure. The first of these concerns ideological constraints. It explores how received ideas about the family and about male leisure have helped to construct women's lack of leisure, and considers whether ‘leisure’ is simply an inadequate and even misleading category for talking about women's lives. The second concerns whether the ‘balance’ that the women in the study talked about instead of leisure is especially problematic in small and isolated communities. It is suggested that although many of the constraints these women cite are instances of forces that oppress women everywhere, women in rural communities can experience them in particularly acute ways. This study of women's leisure is thereby articulated within a growing body of work on rural women.