Work-life balance: how our ancestors fought for free time

History Extra podcast

Immediate Media

History

4.3 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

Work-life balance might seem like a thoroughly modern concern, as many people today struggle to maintain boundaries between our jobs and out home life. But in fact, this issue has a long history. So, how did changing work patterns alter people's ideas about leisure time? And how did people choose to use that leisure time once they had it? Speaking to Elinor Evans, Gary S Cross explores how ideas about "free time" and its uses have evolved. (Ad) Gary S Cross is the author of Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal (New York University Press, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon: .https://www.amazon.co.uk/Free-Time-History-Elusive-Ideal/dp/1479813079/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Find out more about the dramatic story of the suffragette campaign with our new podcast series deeds not words
0:06.3	Episodes release weekly on the history extra feed or subscribe to history extra plus on Apple to access all episodes ad free now.
0:14.0	Welcome to the History Extra Podcast.
0:20.0	Fascinating Historical Confiscuit. Welcome to the History Extra Podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Work life balance might seem like a thoroughly modern concern,
0:37.0	as many of us today struggle to maintain boundaries between our jobs and our home lives.
0:43.0	It's a phrase you hear more than ever since COVID revolutionised working patterns.
0:48.0	But, according to the historian Gary S Cross and his book Free Time, this issue actually has a surprisingly long history.
0:58.0	In today's episode, Gary talks to Eleanor Evans about the evolution of leisure time and some of the things that it's been used for, from festivals and culture to violent entertainment and vice.
1:11.0	I'm very pleased to welcome Gary S Cross today to the podcast and Gary your book is looking at our history
1:16.7	particularly the last 250 years or so broadly speaking how much free time people have had and what people have done with it.
1:23.2	And I hope we could start by defining that sense of free time,
1:26.2	what it means in this sense and what brought you to write about it?
1:29.6	Well, free time basically means time that isn't obligated.
1:34.8	And mostly that means at work, but sometimes it means also at home,
1:39.6	although that's kind of a gray area.
1:42.4	I got interested in this question years and years ago because of movements from the 1980s to reduce the hourly work week in Europe and some places here.
1:54.7	And it became part of an interest I had
1:57.0	in basically how industrialization
2:01.0	has created opportunities for more free time as well as more goods and more income.
2:08.0	Okay, so before industrialization then, can we get a sense of what free time looked like?
2:13.6	Am I right in saying it was seasonal, the work that people were doing was
2:16.5	structured very differently to how we would regard it today? Well there's a common view
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