(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



New Day Cafe: The Home and the Hobby [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-01-07  

JSTOR Daily took a recent look at the origins of hobby workshops in Americans’ homes.

“As more production tasks in the United States and the United Kingdom were mechanized and automated in the first half of the twentieth century, many workers suddenly found themselves with a lot of time on their hands. And for some, that was a real problem. As Frances N. Ahl notes in article in a 1937 issue of The High School Journal, “hobbies are a means of using surplus energy and time in a manner that at least will not be harmful to society and will be useful to the individual,” cautioning readers to engage their children with a hobby as a “boy or a girl with an outside interest or hobby is less likely to get into trouble than a boy or a girl without one...”

But as engineer Rachel Maines explains, boys and girls were never encouraged to seek out the same hobbies. As she points out, “women and girls were not consistently invited to engage in dangerous, noisy, messy or scientific-exploratory amusements” like boys and men. Photography, chemistry sets, and rocketry were for the boys.

Today, perhaps the most visible way that historical division presents itself is in our homes. Basements, sheds, and workshops found their way into American homes because these hobbies for men were often loud, smelly, intrusive, and had “a well-deserved reputation for stinks and bangs, as well as for outright danger to life and limb.” These hobbies, Maines writes, “co-evolved with twentieth-century living spaces, especially single-family residences for the white middle class.”

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/1/7/2215752/-New-Day-Cafe-The-Home-and-the-Hobby?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/