PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Gender not only influences how time is used, it also shapes the way it is experienced. Thus `time' has a different meaning for men and for women. Based on the analysis of hundreds of compositions written by working-class girls in the 1920s, this article examines the significance of gender and age in the perception of time. Changes in the realms of both work and leisure time, a powerful cult of youth, and contemporary debates on the `New Woman' helped girls and young women living in Germany in the interwar period to develop a new relationship to free time. However, while girls claimed leisure opportunities for themselves, they did not challenge the fundamental tension between femininity and access to free time. On the contrary, in the girls' own eyes, constant readiness to work and unflagging concern for the welfare of others remained basic components of adult female identity. Building on these reflections, the final section of the paper focuses on a methodological problem. If it is true that working-class women saw having free time at one's disposal as part of a masculine identity and as virtually incompatible with respectable feminity, evidence on working-class women's leisure activities is unlikely to figure in their self-testimonies. As a close examination of contemporary surveys and oral-history interviews shows, texts by women on their use of time have to be understood as constructions and therefore must be read `against the grain'.