cover image Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States

Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States

Cindy S. Aron. Oxford University Press, USA, $35 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-19-505584-9

The idea of leisure has historically represented dangerous idleness and even sin to many Americans influenced by the legacy of Puritanism. Aron, an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia, has entertainingly charted the rise of the cultural tensions between work and play from the early 19th century, when only a ""small elite"" were able to take a sojourn from their daily routine, into the 1940s, when vacationing had become a mass phenomenon. Drawing on diaries and journals as well as social histories, popular magazines, economic analysis and advertising, Aron shows how 19th-century middle-class vacationers frequently justified their time away from their jobs by structuring their trips around the pursuit of health, religious experiences or educational self-improvement. On the other hand, factory owners and conservative social critics could justify vacations for the working class only by viewing them as a way to increase productivity. Aron is mindful of how issues such as race, religion and union organizing shaped the possibilities and types of recreation available to a wide range of Americans. She makes fascinating observations about such topics as sports and physical exercise for women, how concepts of public modesty changed with the ""bathing costume"" and the role social reformers and charitable groups played in both expanding and limiting the vacation possibilities for immigrants and the inner-city poor. Accessible and enlightening, Aron's social history deserves a popular and wide readership. (May)