Leisure, Women, and Gender

Book excerpt: 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.