Home and Work; Leisure and Me

So, I woke up today at around 10 o'clock, laid around a bit, checked out some Book TV on C-Span2, caught the last game of the Wimbledon final (congrats R-Fed!), watched a TV Guide Channel home remodeling show (who knew?), and saw the end of In the Army Now (my former Bad Movie Club pick). It's now 3 o'clock, and, if you asked me what I've gotten done today, I'd answer in a two-word phrase which sounds an awful lot like "ack sit."

Usually, I'm really anxious about being productive, even on weekends. As I often tell people, academics run on weird time schedules, sometimes working long into the night or weekends. From this ensues the paranoia, the Paranoia! Am I getting enough done? Am I using my time wisely? Of course, this anxiety isn't just the province of academics, everybody who works requires a sort of time structure which can seem unnatural or make you crazy at times. This is something Jeanne Boydston discusses in her brilliant Home and Work (1990). In this book, Boydston shows how changes in labor, paid employment, and the structure of work interacted in and around women's home-making. She notes, "As husbands and children increasingly answered the call of factory bells and office schedules, wives necessarily found their own work reorganized to conform to the timetables of early industrialization. Women's work had always been influenced by the comings and goings of the rest of the household, of course, but the prescriptive literature of the antebellum period suggests a new time consciousness, one directly tied to the discipline of the paid workplace" (104). Catharine Beecher's Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) and many, many other books "trained" women for a job that was similar to the one their mothers had performed but, in new ways, critically different and time-dependent.

What's my point? Mainly, that our conceptions of "time" and how it "should" be arranged are shaped by our culture which is shaped, in turn, by history. We consider these arrangements of time and duty "natural" only because we aren't always offered alternatives and often don't know the history of this revolution in planning. I find this fascinating first because so many people don't have the option to control the timing of their days. Been there; hated that. Second, I wonder why I should be so nervous about being able to control my time. Sure I study hard but not every minute of every day. Then again, why should I? A colleague of mine recently reminded me that art only comes about through access to leisure time. So maybe, just maybe, when I write, I can attribute part of my art and my labor to a morning of simply loafing around.