Leisure
Different disciplines have definitions reflecting their common issues: for example, sociology on social forces and contexts and psychology as mental and emotional states and conditions.
[7] However, the distinction between leisure and unavoidable activities is not a rigidly defined one, e.g. people sometimes do work-oriented tasks for pleasure as well as for long-term utility.
[9] Opportunities for leisure came with more money, or organization, and less working time, rising dramatically in the mid-to-late 19th century, starting in Great Britain and spreading to other rich nations in Europe.
[11] In a recent book, Laurent Turcot argues that leisure was not created in the 19th century but is imbricated in the occidental world since the beginning of history.
[12] In Canada, leisure in the country is related to the decline in work hours and is shaped by moral values, and the ethnic-religious and gender communities.
In a cold country with winter's long nights, and summer's extended daylight, favorite leisure activities include horse racing, team sports such as hockey, singalongs, roller skating and board games.
Play-by-play sports coverage, especially of ice hockey, absorbed fans far more intensely than newspaper accounts the next day.
In the French industrial city of Lille, with a population of 80,000 in 1858, the cabarets or taverns for the working class numbered 1300, or one for every three houses.
[18] As literacy, wealth, ease of travel, and a broadened sense of community grew in Britain from the mid-19th century onward, there was more time and interest in leisure activities of all sorts, on the part of all classes.
In urban Britain, the nine-hour day was increasingly the norm; the 1874 Factory Act limited the workweek to 56.5 hours.
[20][21] Some 200 seaside resorts emerged thanks to cheap hotels and inexpensive railway fares, widespread banking holidays and the fading of many religious prohibitions against secular activities on Sundays.
[22] By the late Victorian era, the leisure industry had emerged in all British cities, and the pattern was copied across Western Europe and North America.
Professionalization of sports was the norm, although some new activities reached an upscale amateur audience, such as lawn tennis and golf.
Soccer proved highly attractive to the urban working classes, which introduced the rowdy spectator to the sports world.
[27] Cricket had become well-established among the English upper class in the 18th century, and was a major factor in sports competition among the public schools.
Army units around the Empire had time on their hands, and encouraged the locals to learn cricket so they could have some entertaining competition.
The more polemical Penguin Specials, typically with a leftist orientation for Labour readers, were widely distributed during World War II.
[36] Romantic encounters were embodied in a principle of sexual purity that demonstrated not only social conservatism, but also how heroines could control their personal autonomy.
The story line in magazines and cinema that most appealed to boys was the glamorous heroism of British soldiers fighting wars that were perceived as exciting and just.
[39] "Casual leisure is immediately, intrinsically rewarding; and it is a relatively short-lived, pleasurable activity requiring little or no special training to enjoy it.
"Project-based leisure is a short-term, moderately complicated, either one-shot or occasional, though infrequent, creative undertaking carried out in free time.
European and American men statistically have more leisure time than women, due to both household and parenting responsibilities and increasing participation in the paid employment.
[46] Older adults, specifically, can benefit from physical, social, emotional, cultural, and spiritual aspects of leisure.
