Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America - Review

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2001 by Daniel J. Walkowitz

Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America. By Steven M. Gelber (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xi plus 374 pp.).

Anyone, like the reviewer, who grew up in the postwar era, will delight in this reprise of one's childhood. For while Steven M. Gelber has written a very serious and sophisticated history of crafts and hobbies in America, along the way readers are treated to a trip down a memory lane, first of collecting--stamps, coins, picture cards, dolls, and so forth--and, then, of hobbies such as embroidery for girls or modeling for boys. But Gelber's study is informed by more than the activities which consumed our youth; it illuminates the reorganization of social space in which they took place and the changing gendered character of hobbies and crafts. Throughout, he also demonstrates how the entire project has been both integral to the experience of work as "productive leisure" and to capitalist development. For instance, Gelber describes how the workshop in the suburban home basement emerged as the creation of male space for productive crafts as leisure is incorporated into post-industrial capitalism. Today this devel opment has its analogue in the Home Depot outlets and handicraft shops which litter the suburban landscape.

As the above suggests, this book will resonate with contemporary readers for the political and cultural meanings which the author illuminates in the sometimes mundane and sometimes special pleasure so many of us have come to take as home-fixer-uppers. Kits popular in the 1950s for building everything from model airplanes to hi-fl radios led to the continuing do-it-yourself craze, which to this day puts a screwdriver and electric drill in the hands of every 'real man' homeowner and gardening and sewing tools in the hands of his spouse. Indeed, this book's special virtue is to historicize and demystify the material conditions of everyday life which industrial culture has tended to naturalize.

The anecdotal pleasure in the author's account is complemented by a compelling theoretical framework and analysis. Gelber astutely recognizes hobbies as occupying a middle ground between work and leisure. More than a casual pastime and less than a paid task, he locates hobbies' origins in the attitudes and values encouraged by capitalism, not industrialization. He is largely convincing on this point, even though his story properly begins within the rise of Victorian collectibles during the heyday of metropolitan industrialization in the 1830s with signature and then spoon and stamp collecting. As Gelber notes, "Hobbies have been a way to confirm the verities of work and the free market inside the home so long as remunerative employment has remained elsewhere." (4)

Gelber divides hobbies into collecting and crafts, focusing on how both emerge after 1880 as hobbies become seen less as a problematic obsession and more as a productive use of leisure. Separate sections of the book present the distinct histories of collecting and handicrafts. Each is seen as "disguised leisure," the former as it "reproduces the ideology of the free market," the latter as "an affirmation of the work ethic."(155) Collecting is detailed more historically, crafting more by type, but both sections are wonderful in their detail and historical analysis. For example, Gelber contrasts "prosperity advocates"' promotion of hobbies as a "morally safe haven from work" in the 1920s with depression-era celebrations of productivity during times of idleness. (296)

The conceptual framework on which Gelber's historical account rests, however, is elaborated in several critical opening chapters. In laying out this framework, Gelber enters a longstanding debate over hobbies as an escape from drudgery or an extension of work into the home. To begin, he turns to sociological work on 'compensatory' versus 'spillover' leisure. The former compensates workers for unsatisfying labor; the latter extends workers' experience into their leisure activities, 'serving society' by bringing industrial values of work into the home. For Gelber, the choice is not between these roles but the integration of them: people take pleasure in hobbies as their achievement both confirms the competence of their industrial skills and the values of their work ethic. But at the same time hobbies can be a relief from odious work. In Gelber's words, as "hobbies actively confirm the ideology of the work ethic by providing a productive way to use leisure, they passively condemn the work environment by offering a contrast to meaningless jobs." (19)

"[E]ven as it contains real elements of critique," ultimately Gelber sees hobbies as an "affirmation of capitalism" which seduce hobbyists. At this point, the argument tends to become a tad reductionist for my taste, as hobbyists appear without their own agency and as victims of capitalist machination--"as disguised affirmation, hobbies were a Trojan horse that brought the ideology of the factory and office to the parlour."(30) But the central place of hobbies within the industrial capitalist ethos and in service to production seems exactly right.