Leisure for Pleasure- Women from Mumbai Suburbs Earning Pleasure out of Their Leisure Time Activities.

Leisure as a form of freedom and self expression could be a means of liberation from the restrictive gender roles and social routines, and thus a means of empowerment. Women’s time and choices are closely circumscribed by their gender and also by their age, ethnic origin and class; these in turn shape their employment status, income levels and household circumstances. The autonomy which women have to enjoy as personal leisure is relative to these overarching structures. Leisure is thus one of women’s relative freedoms. The women workers in Mumbai suburb save time at home by using modern gadgets and that is how they get time to work outside and earn.  Leisure at their disposal allows them to prove their skill in cooking homemade food for the office goers, in the greater city of Mumbai. The owners of the eateries grab the opportunity of these unemployed but resourceful women of the poor worker’s families waiting for a paid job. They give these women workers a job of their choice in order to allow them to fulfill their dream of supporting their family. Leisure creates for these women the opportunity to live a comparatively meaningful and dignified life and enthusing self respect, vigor and humility.

The study aims at finding out the socio economic development of women in Mumbai suburb through working and food producing unit. As many as fifty women workers have been randomly selected.

It appears that leisure for work and pleasure as understood in the context of the present study, seems to operate in making sense of the social system of the women workers engaged in eateries. The study also reveals that they go through a socio-economic development but actually are still far from emancipation yet they try to find pleasure out of their leisure time activities.