Women, More Roles, Less Personal Leisure: A Case of Kanpur City

A need exists to understand leisure in the context of everyday life along with obligations and social structures. As women often occupy more roles than men (e.g., Housekeeper, mother, caregiver etc.( they may have less time available for their own autonomous or personal leisure. For anyone who is in a caregiver’s role, leisure as free time may be irrelevant. Within the role of being a mother, for example, women have many expectations that must be addressed for leisure to happen either personally for women or within the family (Hunter & Whitson, 1991).

The underlying hypotheses of this analysis is that the more roles undertaken by a women, the more likely that the individual is to have less personal leisure. The present study takes the case of fifty household women of Kanpur City, through an interview questionnaire wherein leisure time vis-à-vis their roles were examined. A contradiction seems to exist between addressing the relationships and roles that are central to women’s life and needing time for one. Establishing the findings of Wearing (1991), the present case finds leisure as a place where male power prevails and where traditional feminine identities and roles often are associated with putting men’s wishes and serving men’s leisure before most women claim their own personal leisure. The value of this research is in the theory that is leading to the broader understandings of how gender and roles affect the leisure possibilities of women.