Hedonizing Technologies Paths to Pleasure in Hobbies and Leisure
In 1978 family sociologists Jay Mancini and Dennis Orthner published a paper in the Journal of Sex Research reporting the results of a survey of leisure preferences among couples in a southwestern city. The top pick among the men was predictable: 45 percent preferred to spend their spare time having sex, with "attending athletic events" and "reading books" coming in second and third. The women, however, preferred books to sex: 37 percent would rather be reading. Sex ran a poor second at 26 percent, nearly tying with activities that did not even register on the male leisure scale: needlework and sewing at 25 percent.
Because the authors do not tell us the survey's margin of error, it is a moot question whether sex really won the race for second place on the side of the family. The study enjoyed its fifteen minutes of fame in the form of a brief but spirited debate in newspaper and other periodical editorials, and in indignant letters to advice columnists by men who took women's unflattering preferences as a personal criticism, as indeed they may well have been.
A Gallup poll in March 1977 had also ranked needlework high among women's leisure choices. In answer to the question "What is your favorite way of spending an evening?" a predictable 30 percent of both sexes chose watching television, with reading a faraway second at 12 percent for men and 17 percent for women. Needlework was the favorite activity of 8 percent of the women in this sample and, not very surprisingly, of less than 1 percent of the men, so small a number that Gallup did not even bother to report it. Sex was not offered as an option on the survey checklist, and the response "home with family" is probably not an adequate surrogate.
The Gallup study showed that women did needlework across all income categories, and that they were only slightly more likely to do so if they were rural homemakers rather than urban professionals. Needlework, once a necessity for the poor and a luxury for the rich, has become in the last two centuries a rewarding hobby for large numbers of women -- and sometimes men -- of all social classes: the discount store clerk who crochets afghans, the schoolteacher who knits, the stockbroker who works cross-stitch samplers.
None of these artisans has any need to produce clothing or other goods, or even to spend much time repairing them. Their engagement with needlework is not a practical matter. It is now a leisure activity like sex, gourmet cooking, and amateur photography, and like them its technology has adjusted to a market that privileges the enjoyment of the process over the goal of efficient production. The Industrial Revolution has made leisure needlework a technology of pleasure, along with many other preindustrial activities once performed by necessity and now marketed to consumers as leisure pastimes, including weaving, woodworking, ceramics, painting, hunting, fishing with hook and line, antique auto restoration, the making of soap and candles, cake decorating, food preserving, and horticulture. The success of "home improvement" and "do-it-yourself" enterprises such as Home Depot, and Martha Stewart's print and broadcast obsessions with domestic crafts, are only the most recent manifestations of our historical pleasure in technologies we own and control with eye and hand. In the past ten years, there has been an explosion of published and reprinted titles on pickling, preserving, drying, and other methods of "putting food by," despite the ubiquity of grocery stores. Like the taste of grain, the sensation of manipulating raw material satisfies us at a deep (and possibly genetic) level, resonating with adaptive behaviors dating at least to the Paleolithic. Apparently, many of us like to do things with our hands, whether we need to do them or not.
Although technological change since the eighteenth century has produced conditions in which hobby and leisure activities are economically accessible to nearly everyone in Western industrial democracies, the phenomenon of what we may call "leisure work" is much older. Gardening, hunting, and fishing became hedonized by the wealthy in antiquity as soon as it was unnecessary for these individuals to hunt or gather their own food. In Britain and Europe, leisure hunting by the nobility was by the Middle Ages at the very latest an activity virtually irrelevant to nutrition; at the same period, needlework among noblewomen was already hedonized, not only at home but also in convents, where entire communities set aside time to enjoy the quiet and satisfying rhythm of passing a needle through cloth, making the elaborate, richly decorated garments and church ornaments that the nuns themselves did not use.
Their modern sisters would crochet doilies and potholders by the dozen in much the same way, and in pursuit, I shall argue, of the same kind of pleasure
Most historians of leisure and hobbies seem to regard the embroidery of medieval noblewomen and nuns as if it were work, possibly because many of them do not know how to make the distinction between plain sewing and fancywork, which will be explained later in this section, or perhaps because it is not perceived as parallel to the largely male activities of hunting, hawking, and fishing. What seems to have largely escaped scholarly attention about this use of time by rich women of the Middle Ages is that it was both unnecessary on any practical grounds, and socially approved.
The hypothesis of Steven Gelber and others regarding the non-existence of hobbies before the nineteenth century has at least one element of intuitive appeal: the rise of hobby-related publications in that century made leisure activities much easier to distinguish from their murky backgrounds of work and necessity.
Since the principal defining elements of a leisure activity are that one does not have to do it and that one enjoys the process, our lack of information regarding what preindustrial individuals considered necessary and whether or not they enjoyed what they were doing is a serious handicap to hobby and leisure historiography. Leisure gardening and hobby farming by those who could afford professional gardeners seem definitely to have existed in antiquity, but we know little about whether its practitioners -- particularly Romans like Seneca who were very conscious of their appearance of conformity (or lack of it) to traditional virtues -- actually enjoyed the activity for its own sake, or whether it was a kind of social chore, comparable to attending a socially necessary party at which having a good time is not the point. Hunting for sport is known to have been a standard activity of affluent men in Greek and Roman times, but again, we cannot determine the social pressures to participate or observe the states of mind of the participants.
3 The elder Pliny, arguably antiquity's most prolific font of unreliable information, tells us that gardening was a source of pleasure for the likes of Epicurus and Cato, but we have corroborating first-person accounts of gardening from neither. The same difficulties apply to the embroidery of the female aristocracy: we know that they spun, wove, and embroidered, and that in strictly economic terms they did not need to do so, but we know nothing whatever about their perceptions of social necessity, nor how they felt about conforming to it. It is written documentation that makes the mind of the individual in history accessible to us, and often even that is ambiguous, as in the case of Seneca. Hunting, like gardening, can be a genuinely pleasurable form of leisure or, for men of elite classes in various historical times and places, a social obligation. I shall return to the hedonization of hunting in the context of modern leisure in Chapters 4 and 5.
Although the questions of social pressure and personal enjoyment persist, individual agency regarding hobbies and leisure began to emerge from the murk of necessity in the Middle Ages, and the technologies of these hobbies began to take on some of what we shall come to recognize as the characteristic paths to hedonization. Historically, most women have been "obliged," in Tom Sawyer's sense, to do a great deal of needlework, particularly plain sewing, darning, and mending, which in the industrial era is now economically and socially unnecessary. Anthropologist Elizabeth Barber argues persuasively that textile making became associated with women at least in part because it is compatible with the historically omnipresent responsibility for child-herding and with the care of the sick. Diaries, letters, and fictional accounts by women show clear evidence, however, that many women and some men (including a number of sailors and sailmakers) chose certain needlework tasks for pleasure even when other tasks, like mending, were performed as work.
The distinction between plain and fancy needlework has for the most part dropped out of common twenty-first-century parlance, principally because the parallel processes of industrialization and hedonization have made all needlework optional. The element of necessity formerly associated with plain work has been entirely eliminated. As historical categories, however, plain and fancywork are surprisingly difficult to define; as in many other craft contexts, it is easier to point to examples than to formulate comprehensive definitions.
My approach to what some will no doubt consider to be very primitive bibliometrics was to search WorldCat, the database and online cataloging utility of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), formerly the Ohio College Library Center, on the Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) for each of the leisure crafts I had identified as components of the historical trend toward hedonization.
Some of these required searches on two headings; works on ham radio, for example, may be classed as "Radio -- Amateurs' Manuals" or "Amateur Radio Stations," or both. Formats were limited to exclude visual materials, musical works, sound recordings, and maps. Each subject search began with the "Early Works to 1800" subhead appended to the LCSH, even in cases where I knew there would be no results, as in that of "High-Fidelity Sound Systems." I included 1800 in my searches for the first decade of the nineteenth century, but for the following decades set temporal delimiters of the form "1811 - 1820."
WorldCat, the online union catalog of the Online Computer Library Center, with more than 50,000 member libraries in 96 countries at this writing, has bibliographic records for about 70 million titles. A "title" is a bibliographic entity with its own identity; for example, although a serial may run to many volumes, it is all one "title." Not all materials in member libraries appear on WorldCat; most large libraries, including the Library of Congress, have not yet completed the irreducibly labor-intensive and expensive process of converting their old card catalogs to MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging) format records compatible with modern international bibliographic standards. WorldCat is, however, one of the largest bibliographic databases available to scholars and is readily searchable on a wide variety of access points: subject, author, title, ISBN, and so on. One of WorldCat's many virtues is that it represents the product of more than a hundred years of argument, counter-argument, and consensus-building among librarians about controlled vocabularies, which makes it possible for researchers to pull up more consistently related titles using LCSHs than would be feasible using keywords. A keyword search on "Needlework," for example, even with date limitations, would yield a bewildering and overwhelming number of references.
Like all databases, WorldCat has limitations and biases. It is dominated by works in English, is weak in ephemera (especially of the "pulp" type), and is limited to what is in libraries and cataloged. Most of the data comes from large repositories like university libraries. Cataloging conventions -- most notably, dating works of unknown date by probable century -- create statistical artifacts. In the case of a publication of unknown date, the cataloger may only be able to identify or make an educated guess at the century in which the work was published, e.g., "1800s" or "1900s." In the tables and charts at the end of this appendix, this creates a "heaping" effect on the initial years of centuries, creating the false impression that more works were published in these years than in the immediately preceding and following years. This effect is especially noticeable in the case of serials.