“You have to have some fun to go along with your work”: The Interplay of Race, Class, Gender, and Leisure in the Industrial New South

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the leisure experiences of Southern women textile and tobacco workers from 1910 to 1940 as a way to analyze the meaning of recreation to working-class Southerners and the role of leisure in the development of communities of workers. Important differences in recreation and leisure opportunities for Black and White working class women became clear in the analysis. While White women textile worker's recreation was relatively politically uncharged, perhaps posing only a minor challenge to employers' intentions, African American women tobacco workers transformed recreation and leisure experiences into a vehicle for social change based on race and class issues. White workers seemed to have used leisure for its own sake, perhaps gaining some sense of solidarity with one another in the process, while in the Black community, leisure was almost always entwined with struggles for fair treatment in the work place or a political voice.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• class
• gender
• historical analysis
• labor movements