Women's leisure: divergence, reconceptualization and change — the case of the Netherlands

This paper consists of two sections. In the first, theoretical, section I explore the questions of divergence and reconceptualization of women's leisure with notions derived from Giddens's structuration theory. In the second section these theoretical notions are used to structure empirical findings from the Netherlands. This results in three different types of women's leisure. The traditional family type has a long history, while the modern family type and the individualistic type are rather new. Each type can be characterised by a specific division of leisure into own time, leisured caring time and leisured labour time and by a specific time-space behaviour. Both the modern family type and the individualistic type are strongly related to women's growing participation in the labour market, which for the former type goes hand-in-hand with an unequal gender division of work. The expectation is that, rather than the individualistic type, the modern family type will become most widespread in the Netherlands and that therefore unequal gender relations in the labour, caring and leisure domain will endure.