Customer Reviews

Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modern History)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It is interesting how the focus of leisure has changed among social historians to include elements of working-class leisure. In Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers & Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 by Roy Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig first offers theories as to why labor historians have traditionally shied away from studying leisure as an academic subject, citing the silliness and frivolity old-fashioned academics associate with the subject. After referring to these types of intellectuals as "narrow-minded,' Rozenzweig continues to use the town of Worcester, Massachusetts to discover what constituted pastimes and amusement for Worcester workers by asking three questions. The first asks what have been the traditional values among the American working class, the second asks about the character of interclass relations in America's industrial communities, and the third question asks how class culture and relations changed from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. By examining these questions, Rosenzweig believes that a town like Worcester "offers the best opportunity for capturing workers' lives in all their complexity." (Rosenzweig, 3)
The first two sections of Eight Hours for What We Will are concerned with the saloon and the effect of temperance on workers as well as the use of July Fourth celebrations "to mark out [Worcester's immigrants'] cultural distance not only from the city's elite and native middle class but also from fellow immigrants. (Rosenzweig, 65-86)
Eventually, Rosenzweig writes about how interrelationships of workers led to the rise of a leisure market, an outgrowth of both the saloon and Fourth of July celebrations. One of Rosenzweig's main arguments is that the development of amusement park, continual importance of saloons as leisure arenas, and the beginning of a film culture were all a gradual process that grew with the Worcester community itself. Less a study on the nature of leisure, Rosenzweig effectively indicates how leisure is transformed within the bounds of a working class community.

This book is a helpful resource for anyone wishing to understand the history of Worcester, MA from the 1880s until the 1920s. The theory is that the investigation of leisure time has been overlooked, and this book is an effort to remedy this. It's written in an academic tone, so it's not for everyone. It goes into detail about the changing nature of work, how the local tycoons pitted the workers against one another by deliberately recruiting people from antagonistic ethnic and religious backgrounds, but the book shows that the workers sometimes banded together and won out. It describes the nature and use of saloons, movie theatres, amusement parks, and 4th of July celebrations in a day and age when most workers toiled for 10 hours a day, six days a week, with about 3 holidays a year.