History 3090

Cheap Amusments - Discussion Questions

  As you read each chapter, be sure you can answer the following questions.  This is intended to help you understand the argument Peiss is making about the commercialization of leisure at the turn of the 20th century and its relationship to women's social and economic power in society. 

Big Questions

• How did the reorganization of work in industrial America (1880-1920) change the rhythms of leisure for working men and women?
• How did the commercialization of leisure change women’s experience of “free time”? 
• hat is political about how women and commercial venues structured leisure time?

Chapter One

• Peiss sets up a backdrop of immigrant households in New York City and the organization of work and free time. 
•  What distinguished men and women’s work from the other?  How did this translate into the use of free time? 
• Compare and contrast women and men’s experience according to their ethnicity, class standing, and age/marital status. 
• What does Peiss mean by a “homosocial world” of amusement? 

 Chapter Two

• How did women’s factory labor, as opposed to home-based labor, change women’s experience of leisure?  What important changes took place in the regulation of women’s work place? 
•  What role did work culture play in determining leisure culture? 
• How did women help one, through work, another navigate a new culture of “treating”?

Chapter Three – Putting on Style

• How did landmanschaft organization differ from the commercialized leisure organizations in the city?  What role did they play in courtship? 
•  How did streets and social clubs change the way women expressed themselves? 
• What role did dress and style play? 
• How were women breaking away from family, or patriarchal, ethics and control among various ethnic groups? 
• Who were “women adrift”?  Why did they value “heterosocial" relationships?  

Chapter Four through Six

• Peiss examines working-class women’s leisure experiences in three contexts: dance halls, amusement parks, and movie theaters.  Compare and contrast women’s experience in each example, looking for: 
  •  the way commercialized culture replaced an older traditional culture; 
  • working-class women’s contributions and the way businesses accommodated a new expression and context for women’s sexual expression; 
  •  the changing heterosocial world of leisure; 
  •  the way new forms of leisure ensured women’s position of dependency and vulnerability.

Chapter Seven

• How did middle and upper-class reformers define leisure as a problem? 

• What alternatives did they offer and how did working-class women respond? 

•  How did inter-generational tension shape the success or failure of reformers’ women’s clubs?

  
Finally … 

Look at the evidence that Peiss uses to construct her argument of working-class women’s pursuit of leisure.  Where is the bulk of primary evidence from?  Who collected it in the first place?  What biases might be inherent in it?

        How does the commercialization of leisure and the promise of self-fulfillment through consumption flatten out class differences and perpetuate women’s dependency? 
        Why didn’t the individualism inspired by consumer ideology and heterosocial activities encourage a feminist consciousness among women?

(http://www.udel.edu/History/manko/hist300/PeissReadingGuide.html,  HIST300/WOMS300  Women in American History, Winter 2001, Katina Manko, University of Delaware.)





Leisure time physical activity was also found to be strongly associated with level of education. About 72% of adults who never attended high school were sedentary, declining steadily to 45% among high school graduates and about 24% among adults who had attained graduate level college degrees 



About 40% of U.S. adults were sedentary in 1997, engaging in no leisure time physical activities of any kind. Women (43.2%) were somewhat more likely than men (36.5%) to be sedentary, a finding that held in every age group