{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","uuid":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","normalized_title":"timeconsumptionandeverydaylifepracticematerialityandculture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%2C%20Consumption%20and%20Everyday%20Life%20Practice%2C%20Materiality%20and%20Culture","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/search"},"page":{"printed_page":59,"pdf_page":64,"physical_index":64,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"0c40c3916f3ae6dceb5481feefb4fdcb8b9e463e455aa752a2d59a551216eedd"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"Like in 2000, children were prominent in the narratives of diarists, including those who did not have children of their own. Many of the comments made by mothers about their children held strong similarities with some of the stories from the interviewees of 2000. Mrs Cotton lamented about how her daughter ‘interrupted mostly every minute for help in brick building’. Several mothers spoke of the rush to get children ready for school. Mrs Beken commented on the difficulties of caring for children in school holidays: ‘the woman next door has had to keep all 5 children off school due to whooping cough. . . . The school holidays start in 2 weeks and she is really struggling with controlling and looking after all 7.’ Other than the ‘whooping cough’ and sheer number of children, these are the kinds of difficulties associated with child care expressed by women in 2000.\n\nDespite children having a strong presence in the diaries, there was no sense of an impending need to create time to spend together. Children were seen as household helpers. Take Mrs Beken’s Saturday diary as an example: ‘7.05: Sent Norman, my 9 year old son, to get milk from the dairy’. At 4 p.m., Norman is off shopping again: ‘Send Norman to get biscuits for tea as I have no time for scones as planned. Children contributed (more so than men) to domestic chores within the home and there was no implication beyond Mrs Cotton’s mention of ‘donkey riding’ that special measures were required to coordinate togetherness or quality time with children specifically.\n\nMore interesting, however, were relationships between partners. Diaries read almost as if partners engaged in separate practices during their day-to-day lives. Men went to work. When they were in the home they tended to engage in leisure activities alone. Eight of the women stated that on the evening their husband ‘read’, some listened to the ‘wireless’, Mr Cotton ‘did his stamps’; others went out after ‘tea’ to ‘the pub’ or a ‘Union meeting’. Mr and Mrs Cotton spent some time together during the Saturday day-time, two other couples went for a drink in the local pub on the Saturday evening, and one couple went out for a business meal with the husband’s ‘French acquaintances’. Compared with the interviews of 2000, where every couple spoke in great detail of the need to make time to spend with one’s partner and took measures to achieve this objective, spending leisure time together in 1937 appeared less frequent and was largely taken for granted as something that just happened within the temporal rhythms of the day. Whether this was only the result of the rigidity of temporal rhythms or because what constitutes a close relationship between partners has changed is less clear. Certainly, many of the diarists wrote of strained relationships with their husbands, and any sense of a desire to achieve the perfect ‘intimate’ relationship (Giddens 1991) was absent. In this respect, ‘making time’ for intimate relationships can be regarded as a contemporary concern. The changing temporal rhythms of daily life are interrelated to changing cultural ideals surrounding relationship practices: the need to coordinate daily life because of the fragmentation of collective temporal rhythms both reinforces and facilitates cultural ideals of seeking the perfect ‘intimate relationship’, a relationship in which quality time is ‘made’ for one another.\n\nRe-ordering Temporal Rhythms\n\n59","previous_page":58,"next_page":60}