Negotiating Time and Space for Serious Leisure: Quilting in the Modern U.S. Home

IntroductionThis is mine. Quilting is my reward. Once the toilets are clean and the dishes are done it is quilting time. And like tonight, I'll sit and watch the baseball game all night and quilt. (Sandy, early 4Os)1Quilting is thought by many to be a harmless, traditional, even quaint or silly feminized2 activity, although 15% of U.S. households participate in quilting (Quilting in America Survey, 2003). Most contemporary American women who quilt bring in little if any money to the family economy, and to the outside eye there are not obvious or clear professional and legitimizing outlets for this activity as other leisure pursuits have (e.g., professional golf). Because of these and other factors, quilting has been conceived of as a traditional pursuit, one that is unimportant and therefore non-threatening to regular, traditional family life. As of late, quilting has transformed from a necessary home activity to a non-essential activity, one that resembles leisure more so than work. Thus, for American women in traditional heterosexual relationships with families, serious leisure quilting takes up their already limited time and space in the household.3 Sometimes both quilters and their families feel this valuable time and space should be devoted to family needs, not women's individual creative needs that are met through quilting activities. Women quilters challenge traditional family dynamics when they take leisure time for themselves, yet they simultaneously embody feminine characteristics by engaging in what we consider a feminine and traditional activity. However, women negotiate the tensions between family and quilting demands by finding the time and space in their lives to accomplish both. Drawing upon unstructured interviews with 70 women, I address how contemporary American serious leisure quilters negotiate the constraints of time and space for quilting amidst other gendered familial duties.Women quilters resist time and space issues not by rejecting the constraints altogether, but by developing strategies to incorporate quilting into family interests. Dealing with the realities of the unpaid second shift of housework and childcare (Hochschild, 1989), women who engage in paid work blend their serious leisure interests with their second shift responsibilities-they quilt while waiting for children's doctor's appointments and sporting events, and they customize quilting projects to fit into their already hurried lives.4 Through this resistance process, quilters manage the guilt they sometimes feel while quilting because they believe that separate hobby interests "take away" from family responsibilities. For example, Denise is married and the mother of two children, and when cutting fabric for a quilt she moves to be near the family so that she can cut fabric and be with her family: "I have a little tiny space that has a cutting board and I will work in there, but I get lonesome for my family. So I will basically go where my family is." Here, Denise negotiates choosing to spend time quilting and spending time with her family. Clearly, she is making a choice to both quilt and spend time with her husband and children. However, Denise fills the role of caretaker before the role of quilter, as she places being with the family over quiltingshe does not move her family to her quilting area. Additionally, Denise's storage system for when she is working on a specific project is shaped by her husband's neat organizational style:My husband is a very precise person, he likes things tidy and I do not, so I keep all the fabric from one project in a box and then I'll carry the box with me and then put everything back in. That's helping, but not really.Note how Denise first described her husband's organizational preferences, then her own, and next she includes how she has changed her ways to fit her husband's ways. In both of these passages from Denise's interview it is clear that Denise is modifying her quilting based upon her family and her family's needs and preferences. …