Challenges and Transformations in Women’s Leisure, Sport and Physical Education Movements

Feminist (leisure) researchers in the 1980s and 1990s argued that the context of women’s leisure was, at best, one of ‘relative freedoms’ (Wimbush & Talbot, 1988), something achieved in the context of multiple constraints (Henderson, Bialeschki, Shaw, & Freysinger, 1989). Some empirical studies in the UK questioned whether and how women had leisure at all, ‘Women’s leisure what leisure?’ (Green, Hebron, & Woodward, 1990) and ‘All work and no play’ (Deem, 1986) being particularly significant contributions that drew on critical feminist analysis at the time. A number of feminists were already connecting leisure, sport and physical education in the early 1980s (Deem, 1982; Hargreaves, 1986) and in 1980 Margaret Talbot made the case for women’s sport to be analysed in the context of leisure (Talbot, 1980). This has had, and continues to have, a profound influence on scholarship in and across our varied areas of interest and analysis (Hall, 1987; Hargreaves, 1994; Scraton, 1985).