When we talk about leisure, we may imagine weekend brunches, vacations with friends and family, an afternoon nap, or the luxury of dolce far niente. Yet leisure is not distributed equally. Who gets to rest? Who controls their own time? Whose labour makes someone else’s leisure possible? Access is shaped not only by gender, but also by class, caste, race, disability, sexuality, migration, age, geography, and caregiving responsibilities. These questions ask us to consider which women have access to leisure, in what contexts, and under what conditions.
Leisure, rest, and self-care overlap, but they are not identical. Rest restores the body and mind; self-care refers to practices that sustain well-being; leisure includes play, pleasure, creativity, connection, and exploration pursued without an externally imposed or productive purpose.
Research on leisure and meaning emphasizes freedom of choice and intrinsic motivation: leisure is something a person wishes to do and feels free to choose, including the choice to do nothing.
In a world organized around productivity and unequal access, leisure can become a form of resistance, power, and reclamation. It challenges capitalist, patriarchal, and class-based systems that treat women’s time as available to others rather than belonging to them.
Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, frames rest as resistance to grind culture and systems that measure human worth through productivity. Rest can interrupt cycles of overwork, burnout, and self-neglect, while affirming that well-being is not conditional on output.
But leisure is more than sleep—it’s play, creative expression, learning, exploration, and connection. It’s reading a novel with no goal in mind. Dancing in the living room. Journaling for yourself, not for an audience. Meeting a friend just to laugh together.
Who gets to rest? The politics of time
Time is experienced differently across cultures, but it is also political.
Access to time for rest, care, work, and leisure is shaped by social norms, economic structures, and public policies, from paid leave and public services to expectations around gender and caregiving. The central issue is not simply whether women have fewer leisure hours, but whether they have the power to decide how their time is used. India’s time-use data makes this inequality visible.
According to Time Use Survey (TUS) data for India, women dedicate considerably more time to household chores and caregiving, even as their participation in paid work increases, potentially creating a “double burden”. This disparity in work and leisure is a pervasive issue, deeply embedded in India’s social fabric and traditional gender roles.
Data shows Indian women continue to spend significantly more time on unpaid work, including household chores and caregiving, compared to men. Among individuals aged 15–59, 41% of women took on caregiving duties for household members, while only 21.4% of men in the same age group did the same. Even when men participated, the time they spent was noticeably less. Women dedicated around 140 minutes daily to caregiving, while men managed just 74 minutes.
These figures reveal more than a leisure gap. They show an unequal distribution of decision-making power over time: when care is treated as women’s default responsibility, women have less ability to choose when to work, rest, participate in public life, or pursue pleasure. This imbalance is not unique to India.
Across OECD countries, women continue to perform more unpaid work than men, even as the size and form of the gap vary. In different-sex couples, women generally spend substantially more time on housework and childcare than men. The division tends to be most traditional in male-breadwinner households, but it remains unequal even when both partners work full-time. OECD data shows that greater equality at home is closely linked to greater equality in paid work.
Although the magnitude of the imbalance differs across countries, the pattern reflects a shared challenge: entrenched gender norms that assign care and domestic responsibilities primarily to women.
Across the world, the unequal distribution of unpaid labour constrains women’s education, career progression, political participation, income, and control over their daily lives. Addressing it requires more than economic growth. It demands public investment in care, fair labour protections, cultural change, and recognition that care work is a central pillar of social and economic life.
Home as a Site of Unpaid Labor
Does picturing a cosy home set up signify rest for you?
Not necessarily. Home may be restorative for some women and a site of uninterrupted labour for others. Who we live with matters as much as where we live, and different living arrangements create different configurations of autonomy, constraint, care, and support.
In shared households, particularly within heterosexual family structures, women’s time is often absorbed by domestic obligations such as cooking, cleaning, caregiving, and the subtle but endless work of emotional regulation.
A woman’s home life can include watching her favourite TV show or gardening her precious plants . It is interrupted by a child’s homework question, or a moment of quiet reading is paused to serve a meal. What might look like collective “family leisure” is, in fact, scaffolded by women’s invisible labor to make it possible. Even among roommates, gendered expectations can creep in: women often pick up the slack on household organization, creating a constant background of responsibility that chips away at rest.
Living alone may offer greater control over time and space, but it does not automatically create freedom. It can also involve isolation, economic insecurity, safety concerns, or a lack of care and support. Women living alone may be better able to protect their leisure from household negotiation while still facing cultural stigma for prioritizing their own time. The issue is not which living arrangement is best, but how each arrangement distributes autonomy, responsibility, resources, and care.
These patterns are not universal. They are shaped by class, caste, race, ethnicity, migration status, disability, sexuality, age, and geography.
In India and elsewhere, some households outsource domestic and care work, but this does not eliminate inequality; it may shift the burden to working-class, caste-marginalized, or migrant women whose labour makes another household’s leisure possible. Within the employing household, women may still carry the mental work of hiring, supervising, scheduling, and paying for that labour. A feminist politics of leisure must therefore ask not only how individual women reclaim time, but whose time and labour make that reclamation possible.
Society rarely acknowledges these disparities.
“Family fun night” is celebrated, while the hidden labor behind it is ignored. Meanwhile, solitary leisure for women is framed as self-care or indulgence, rather than a basic right to rest. Living arrangements, in a way, are political landscapes where gendered power relations determine who gets to relax and who keeps the world running.
What Does Collective Feminist Leisure Look Like?
Feminist leisure cannot be reduced to shopping, spa days, or individualized self-care. It can include writing, music, learning, sport, exploration, celebration, and simply spending time without a productive goal. It can also be collective: shared meals, community gatherings, informal creative spaces, friendship, dancing, storytelling, and rest practiced together. These spaces foster safety, pleasure, connection, and belonging. They allow communities to care for one another and build solidarity outside institutions organized around productivity or crisis.
The home is a paradox in feminist conversations about leisure. It is often where women perform invisible, unpaid labour and where they seek rest, pleasure, or creative fulfilment. Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift describes how paid work is followed by another shift of cooking, cleaning, caregiving, and emotional labour. Even at home, many women lack control over when and how they rest.
In “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde describes the erotic as a source of deeply felt knowledge and power: a capacity for pleasure, aliveness, connection, and agency that can expose how little we have been taught to expect from our lives. This is broader than leisure, but it helps explain why freely chosen pleasure and creative expression matter politically. In Sisters of the Yam, bell hooks likewise connects self-recovery with collective struggle. Leisure, in this sense, is not merely private indulgence; it can help sustain feminist movements and relationships of care.
Recognizing leisure as a political act reframes it from a personal luxury to a shared right. True feminist leisure challenges the structures that limit women’s autonomy over their time and energy, insisting that rest, joy, and creative exploration are not afterthoughts but essential conditions for a more equitable society. When women can claim leisure free from the demands of unpaid labor, they reclaim not just time but power, presence, and the possibility of collective transformation.
Whose Knowledge Shapes Feminist Leisure?
Dominant feminist conversations about leisure and rest have not always asked “for whom?” with enough rigour. Rather than treating “North American” and “non-Western” feminism as two homogeneous camps, we should ask whose knowledge and experience have historically been centred. Scholarship on white feminism describes an “exclusive universalism” that treats the experiences of straight, white, middle-class, nondisabled women as if they represent all women, while marginalizing other feminist traditions and realities.
This has real consequences for how leisure is defined and discussed. Journalist and author Koa Beck argues that white feminism often focuses on individual accumulation, capital, and individuality. This helps explain why leisure is so often reframed as personal consumption, such as spa days, wellness retreats, and solo travel, rather than as a structural and collective concern. When leisure is individualized, questions about access, labour, and power disappear.
A commentary in Gender, Work & Organization notes that inclusion within mainstream feminist spaces can be conditional on conforming to dominant Western standards of critique, language, and intelligibility. The point is not that any region or culture speaks with one voice. It is that Latina, Indigenous, Black, Asian, diasporic, migrant, religious, queer, and other situated feminist traditions are too often treated as peripheral, even when mainstream conversations claim to speak for everyone.
Leisure is never experienced outside culture, history, material conditions, or power. Rest can carry different meanings, obligations, risks, and forms of permission within and across communities. An inclusive feminist politics of leisure must therefore treat these differences as foundational, not as a footnote, and resist turning any one group’s experience into a universal standard.
Rest and Leisure Beyond Justification
Rest and leisure can be feminist practices because they challenge systems that commodify time, extract care, and restrict autonomy. In a world where time is unequally distributed and women’s paid and unpaid labour is undervalued, claiming time for rest or pleasure may be an act of resistance. But rest should not have to become productive, exemplary, or politically useful before it is considered legitimate.
To rest and play is to claim the right to exist beyond function and service. Sometimes that claim is resistance; sometimes it is simply a nap, a laugh, a game, or an hour that belongs to no cause. Both matter. A feminist politics of leisure must work to redistribute care and time, expand material access, and make leisure a shared social good. It must also defend the right to joy without requiring women to explain what that joy produces.
In A Burst of Light, Audre Lorde wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Lorde’s words remind us that care can be politically necessary, particularly for people whose bodies and lives are devalued. Yet leisure need not always carry the burden of resistance. Well-being, creativity, rest, pleasure, and play are not privileges to be earned or arguments to be proved. They are part of being fully human.
Authors Bio:
Atiya Anis
Atiya works at the intersection of communication, equity, and technology, amplifying underrepresented voices and advancing impact through storytelling, data, and advocacy. Her vision is to build communication ecosystems that do more than inform: they shift power and help build more equitable futures.
Nathalie Martin
Nathalie Martin is a communications executive, social entrepreneur, and global drowning-prevention advocate with more than 25 years of experience. She is the founder and executive director of the Swim Global Project, a volunteer-led movement advancing equitable access to swimming, water safety, and lifesaving education worldwide. Her work is grounded in public health, gender equity, community knowledge, and the belief that learning to swim is a human right.
