Gendered Histories, Gendered Constraints: The Spirit Of Youth And Leisure

Foundational texts serve as pedagogical tools for students in classrooms as well as philosophical guideposts for scholars that explore lived experiences through research. In examining the foundational texts within leisure studies that includes Johan Huizinga’s (1949) Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture and Josef Pieper’s (1952) Leisure the Basis for Culture, the earliest has been Veblen’s (1899) Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institution with a noted void comprised of diverse voices. More recently, it has been raised that Du Bois landmark study (1899), The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study merits consideration for inclusion as a foundational text (Mowatt, Floyd, & Hylton, 2017). By extension, based on the date of publishing and the stature of the author, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets by Jane Addams also warrants such an inclusion due to the significance of the discussion. Addams argued, as an early form of Leisure Justice (Henderson, 2014), that the environment of the city “is thronged streets, its glittering shops, its gaudy advertisements of shows and amusements” (p. 54) that lead youth to seek “adventures”, which often turn into criminal activity and thus the work of settlement houses, youth development, and youth recreation were paramount as an intervention. Further, Addams posited that, “organizing a child’s activities with some reference to the life [s]he will later lead and of giving [her or] him a clue as to what to select and what to eliminate when [s]he comes in contact with contemporary social and industrial conditions” (p. 109). Yet the discussion and inclusion of Addams and this text is absent from most textbooks in the way that would present as a necessary reading for future practitioners and scholars focused on programming and community development (Henderson, Bialeschki, Shaw, & Freysinger, 1996). What is presented here is a discussion of: 1) a summary of The Spirit of Youth; 2) the role of programming in overcoming cultural and structural constraints based on Addams assessment of the treatment of immigrant youth (Chick & Dong, 2003), albeit absent of an intersectional perception of crime and enforcement that was evident in the Racial Restrictive Covenants of Chicago at the time (Watson & Scraton, 2013); and 3) the ways in which academia genders and silences, as an additional form of intellectual constraint, the voices of women in scholarship (Aitchison, 2001; Henderson & Gibson, 2013; Samdahl, 2016). By properly situating The Spirit of Youth as the first published example of an articulated programming philosophy, we are gifted with an improved understanding of foundational texts in leisure studies that incorporates early development of theory (Veblen, 1899), research (Du Bois, 1899), and practice (Addams, 1909) for the modern age.