Until recently the Sociology of Leisure was dominated by theoretical approaches which made women's experiences invisible. Drawing upon feminist perspectives this book re-conceptualises leisure in order to provide a more informed understanding of women's leisure. The authors argue that such an examination necessarily involves a study of women's daily lives which views leisure in relation to the structure of their lives as a whole. Drawing upon a major study of Sheffield women's leisure and other sources, the processes of negotiation and social control are cited as crucial in determing women's access to free time and the resources required to enjoy leisure.

Leisure, Women, and Gender is part of an ongoing examination that explores and elaborates issues of leisure for girls and women. The book is both an update of A Leisure of One's Own: A Feminist Perspective on Women's Leisure (1989) and Both Gains and Gaps: Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Leisure (1996) and a departure from these earlier works, in its process and structure. Specifically, in this volume, rather than writing about the research that others are doing, we invited some of those researchers to talk about how they came to study leisure, women, and gender; what they have learned from their research; and to reflect on directions for future research. Hence, organizationally and structurally it falls in the “middle ground” between a co-authored and an edited book: it mixes writing by the book’s editors with the voices of invited scholars, who contribute central and additional perspectives regarding the topics.

Women, Leisure and Tourism provides a comprehensive discussion of women, leisure, and tourism through the lens of leisure production and consumption, both by women and for women. Specifically, this text includes a multi-cultural perspective to highlight the unique attributes leisure brings to women, the role of women in leisure entrepreneurship, and the creation of supportive, inclusive environments to enhance female well-being through the examination of these activities in often overlooked populations. The diversity of women's leisure and tourism practices is best perceived through the links between various leisure practices (e.g., sport, outdoor recreation, travel and tourism, learning, crafts, events, family leisure), as well as an understanding of leisure production across cultures and life stages. These chapters bring to the forefront many of the challenges inherent in providing leisure and tourism that support the diverse needs of women, as well as a look at female innovation that is also often overlooked in leisure research. The book includes examples of both applied and conceptual chapters from global perspectives in academic studies.

Displaying Women explores the role of women in the representation of leisure in turn-of-the-century New York. To see and be seen--on Fifth Avenue and Broadway, in Central Park, and in the fashionable uptown hotels and restaurants--was one of the fundamental principles in the display aesthetic of New York's fashionable society. Maureen E. Montgomery argues for a reconsideration of the role of women in the bourgeois elite in turn-of-the-century America. By contrasting multiple images of women drawn from newspapers, magazines, private correspondence, etiquette manuals and the New York fiction of Edith Wharton, Henry James and others, she offers a convincing antidote to the long-standing tendency in women's history to overlook women whose class affiliations have put them in a position of power.

This groundbreaking study surveys how working-class women, restricted by gender, time, and financial means, as well as cultural and social tensions, managed to find spheres of leisure and recreation.

This text draws upon recent feminist theoretical interventions to suggest a framework for the history of women's leisure which explicitly problematises the category leisure and foregrounds its relationship to work within women's lives.