Abstract:
Using case studies from nineteenth-century Australia and eighteenth-
century England this paper explores women's use of leisure spaces to
resist oppression. The first case study examines the phenomenon of middleclass
women in colonial Australia in the context of the genteel and sometimes
subversive leisure activities of letter writing and keeping journals. The refractory
leisure behaviours and attitudes of many of the convict women transported
from Britain to New South Wales in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries provides the material for the second case study. Working women of
eighteenth-century England's insistence on continuing the practice of social tea
drinking is the subject of the third case study. The case studies provide evidence
of women's agency through leisure spaces to resist, negotiate, contest and sometimes
transform their access to leisure at an individual and a community level.
