Negotiating Time and Space for Serious Leisure: Quilting in the Modern U.S. Home

Drawing upon unstructured interviews with 70 American women quilters, I examine the pair the leisure constraints they experience and the acts of resistance they engage in while practicing serious leisure quilting. smooth though quilting is a feminized and sexed activity, there are still time and space constraints in the traditional heterosexual family which impact quilting. Women resist like constraints and stereotypical notions of sex relations as they pursue serious leisure quilting. They quilt first for themselves, and next to the first to administer to family and kin exigencys in gendered ways (e.g., gifts that mortar emotional ties to family and friends). As a serious leisure activity, quilting highlights by what mode women accept, reproduce, and negotiate traditional notions of sex in families.

KEYWORDS: Serious leisure, constraint and resistance, women's leisure, family, quilting.

Introduction

This is mine. Quilting is my reward. one time the toilets are clean and the dishes are done it is quilting time. And like tonight, I'll sit and watch the baseball game all night and quilt. (Sandy, early 4Os)1

Quilting is meditation by many to be a harmless, traditional, flat quaint or silly feminized2 activity, although 15% of U households participate in quilting (Quilting in America contemplate 2003). Most contemporary American women who quilt bring in little if any circulating medium to the family economy, and to the outside organ of vision there are not obvious or clear professional and legitimizing exits for this activity as other leisure pursuits have (eg professional golf) Because of these and other factors, quilting has been conceived of as a traditional pursuit, individual that is unimportant and therefore non-threatening to regular, traditional family life. As of late, quilting has transformed from a necessary abiding-place activity to a non-essential activity, single that resembles leisure more in the way that than work. Thus, for American women in traditional heterosexual relationships with families, serious leisure quilting takes up their already limited time and space in the household.3 Sometimes the couple quilters and their families have feeling this valuable time and space should be devot to family emergencys not women's individual creative straits that are met through quilting activities. Women quilters challenge traditional family dynamics when they take leisure time for themselves, still they simultaneously embody feminine characteristics by dint of engaging in what we consider a feminine and traditional activity. However, women negotiate the tensions between family and quilting demands by means of finding the time and space in their lives to accomplish the two Drawing upon unstructured interviews with 70 women I address in what manner contemporary American serious leisure quilters negotiate the constraints of time and space for quilting amidst other sexed familial duties.

Women quilters resist time and space issues not by means of rejecting the constraints altogether, on the other hand by developing strategies to incorporate quilting into family interests. Dealing with the realities of the unpaid next to the first shift of housework and childcare (Hochschild, 1989) women who engage in paid work unite their serious leisure interests with their next to the first shift responsibilities-they quilt while waiting for children's doctor's appointments and sporting occurrences and they customize quilting throws to fit into their already hurried lives.4 [i]or[/i] part of to the other this resistance process, quilters manage the guilt they sometimes have feeling while quilting because they believe that separate pacing horse interests "take away" from family responsibilities. For example, Denise is married and the mother of sum of two units children, and when cutting fabric for a quilt she impels to be near the family for a like reason that she can cut fabric and be with her family: "I have a little tiny space that has a cutting board and I will work in there, on the contrary I get lonesome for my family. with equal reason I will basically go where my family is." Here, Denise negotiates choosing to expend time quilting and spending time with her family. Clearly, she is making a choice to the couple quilt and spend time with her husband and children. However, Denise fills the part of caretaker before the part of quilter, as she places being with the family above quiltingshe does not move her family to her quilting area. Additionally, Denise's storage a whole for when she is working upon a specific project is shaped through her husband's neat organizational style:

My husband is a actual precise person, he likes things tidy and I do not, with equal reason I keep all the fabric from individual project in a box and then I'll carry the chest with me and then lay everything back in. That's helping, on the contrary not really.

Note by what means Denise first described her husband's organizational elections then her own, and nearest she includes how she has changed her ways to fit her husband's ways. In the one and the other of these passages from Denise's interview it is clear that Denise is modifying her quilting based on her family and her family's wants and preferences.

Quilting can be understood as a serious leisure activity that women revolve to primarily for escape, relaxation and creativity. As noted by the agency of Stebbins (1979), serious leisure is: "a systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or proffer activity that participants find thus substantial and interesting that they launch themselves upon a career, centred on acquiring and expressing its special skills, knowledge, and experience" (p 3) Women who engage in serious leisure quilting as participants in this application of mind do, typically learn to quilt as adults, pay others for quilting instruction, and make quilts as individuals rather than in clumps (e.g., quilting bees). Quilting, like other serious leisure activities, is aptly considered superfluous to the household economy.5 greatest in quantity contemporary American quilters learn and practice quilting in serious leisure ways-they track it voluntarily and intensely for individual pleasure. Women also quilt because it helps them relax from paid work, unpaid household work, and other familial carework duties. For further clarification, Stebbins (1996) outlines six characteristics of a serious leisure participant: