A Job You Can't Lose: Work and Hobbies in the Great Depression

A Job You Can't Lose: Work and Hobbies in the Great Depression

Steven M. Gelber

1991

Journal Article

Steven M. Gelber

Journal Article

0022-4529

Hobbies of every kind experienced an upsurge in popularity during the Great Depression of the 1930's. The term "hobbies" itself emerged as a category of socially condoned leisure activity, supported by "experts" in the media, education, government agencies, and the hobby world. Hobby experts defined appropriate pastimes as teaching or replicating important elements of work. Hobbies were to educate, develop specific mental and manual skills, promote discipline and perseverance. But unlike so many jobs, hobbies provided participants with a sense of creativity and achievement, and a work-like environment in which they were their own bosses. In this sense, hobbies were not "non-work" leisure time, but rather the ideal job that evaded most modern workers. Collecting was the most complex of the hobbies in terms of its relationship to work because it contained elements of speculation and exploitation that raised serious ethical considerations. Although people chose hobbies because they provided a pleasurable relief from work (or the idleness of unemployment), the underlying reasons for the emergence of hobbies as a socially sanctioned pastime lay in the similarities between work and hobbies, not in their differences. The history of hobbies in the 1930's lends support to the argument that much leisure is congruent with work even though there may be some elements that compensate for work place shortcomings.

2017-04-23 23:39:39

1991

4

JSTOR

741-766

Journal of Social History

A Job You Can't Lose

A Job You Can't Lose: Work and Hobbies in the Great Depression

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3788855

24

JSTOR Full Text PDF

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.2307/3788855.pdf?acceptTC=true