The Public at Play: Gender and the Politics of Recreation in Post-War Ontario

Margaret Kechnie is head of the Women’s Studies Program at Laurentian
University and the co-editor of Changing Lives: Women in Northern
Ontario.

The Public at Play looks at government-funded recreation programs in
Ontario between 1945 and 1961, with emphasis on the gendered links among
liberalism, democracy, and leisure in the welfare state that emerged
during the period. Framing her discussion within a socialist-feminist
framework, the author critiques both liberalism and theories of
democracy.

The recreation committees established in the postwar period were
intended to strengthen liberal democracy and promote social equality
among girls and women. Some political theorists and activists hoped that
the liberalism and democracy would enhance the welfare state. Tillotson
argues that the movement for public recreation, although popular, was
ultimately a failure because it lost its democratic ideals over time;
the grassroots volunteer leadership that characterized the early
recreation movement was gradually swallowed up by professionalization.

The book explores many questions about the purpose of public recreation
and women’s prescribed roles and wives and mothers. It also questions
the treatment of women who were employed in these programs. For example,
in a chapter titled “The Feminine Mystique in Community Leadership:
Women Volunteers in Public Recreation,” Tillotson discusses the ways
in which women’s experiences within the recreation movement were, at
best, not taken seriously and, at worst, dismissed. The democratic
principles that were intended to inform the recreation movement and the
welfare state were thus never realized.