The history of leisure

A few highlights from Witold Rybczynski's Waiting for the Weekend (1991)

In the 1600s, Puritans put people to death if church was missed one too many times:

The penalty for a first offense was losing a week's provisions; for the second offense, whipping; and for the third, death.  (p.74)

In the 1700s, the act of reading became privatized and individualized:

Before widespread literacy, books were more often read to people than by people.  Reading was a public, social activity.  Once people learned to read silently, reading became an act of quiet and solitude.  (p.189-190)

In the 1870s, British elites "invented" the weekend:

[They] began to speak of "week-ending" or "spending the week-end."  The country houses of the wealthy were ... now easily reached by train.  It became fashionable to go there on Friday afternoon and return to the city on Monday  (p.128)

In the 1900s and 1910s, nickelodeons established cinema as America's chief public amusement:

People could drop in to see a one-reel melodrama or a slapstick comedy during their lunch break, after work, or, despite the protestation of religious groups, on Sunday, when many nickelodeons stayed open illegally.  (p.136)  But this "distinctly proletarian" form of entertainment offended middle-class sensibilities, and movie theaters became the new, more respectable, norm:  "Nickelodeons were small, sleazy storefront operations, seating no more than three hundred; movie theaters, which were located along prominent streets rather than in lower-class neighborhoods, were usually more than three times larger."  (p.139-140)

In the 1930s, it was, ironically, not labor activism but the Great Depression which ultimately standardized the 40-hour work week:

Shorter hours came to be widely regarded as a remedy for unemployment - people would work less, but more people would have jobs.  (p.143)