Some Thoughts on Leisure

I was recently re-reading Kaja Silverman’s Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse and Mary Beth Haralovich’s paper on the 1950s suburban homemaker, and I was reminded of an issue that struck me several times throughout the semester. In the opening of her paper Silverman discusses the transition from lavish masculine dress to more modest styles, principally citing the demands of work and industry as the reason for the change. As we know from Sarah Berry among other sources, clothing styles, particularly for the upper classes, had long been associated with the specific activities for which individual garments were intended. The emerging middle class in the eighteenth century pressured the upper classes, formerly associated with leisure and luxury, toward a more modest and industrious ideal. Even for men that did not work, it was no longer fashionable to make that fact apparent. Of course the fashionable expectation of productivity had its limits, and a specific brand of gentlemanly, managerial occupations became the only suitable labors for upper class men.

I find the implicit tension between industry and leisure in Haralovich’s essay very interesting. In the sitcom (and in Haralovich’s paper) women are constantly navigating the space between ornamentation and servitude. Clearly these suburban goddesses are not allowed to obtain outside employment, but even their work in the home is veiled—often implied but rarely shown. When a woman’s labor is shown, it is often dressed up in pearls and party dresses like a game or peculiar feminine folly. This is due in part to the rhetoric of the shangri-la of the suburban home of this era, but the tension seems to extend deeper than this in interesting ways. Haralovich notes that the work of the male is also veiled in that his place and type of employment is often ambiguous and the only official site of work that actually extends into the home—the man’s den or study—is often shrouded in mystery, with little of the show’s action revealing the space behind its generally closed doors. At one point, Haralovich notes that visible labor is classed, as she discusses the rare evidence of a “bad (working class) neighborhood” in an episode of Leave It to Beaver. People are not only doing work in public in the neighborhood Wally wanders into, but work (a car being reassembled, garbage collection) has also invaded the private sphere of the residential neighborhood.

While it is a bit of a leap, I feel that this positioning harkens not only to the leisure/work tension discussed in Silverman’s article, but also works to establish the value of the middle class in the 1950s. While not quite an idle ornament, the 50s housewife is value added to the suburban home beyond (and possibly in spite of) her domestic labors. It seems that there is an element of this ‘value added’ idea in some rhetoric surrounding the place and position of the middle class at large in the postwar period.

Debates around work and play, industry and leisure, form and function, ornamentation and utility, and appearance and content seem to permeate most discussions on femininity and feminism. These questions are clearly central to the issues of place and purpose that challenge and inform modern feminine identity, which is inextricably interwoven with the same tensions in relation to other signifiers like race and class. I realize that this discussion would have been more fruitful several weeks ago when we were discussing sitcoms, but this week’s particular attention to labor has caused me to revisit some of these readings and ideas.