Benjamin Hunnicutt

Our grandparents thought that the last century would be the time when the machine and technology finally freed human beings -- freed us to live substantial parts of our lives beyond "necessity" and work. Prominent intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw, Julian Huxley, and John Maynard Keynes, confidently predicted that a widening expanse of time would open in the technological age, and that our primary concerns would come to be how to live rather than how to make a living. An educator such as Robert Hutchins (the most influential of all the presidents of the University of Chicago) saw mass leisure as the great, modern challenge and opportunity-- education for leisure, not work, was once seen as the university's destiny, its final purpose and mission.

But we who toil in this century's first decade dare not imagine such things. Instead of our work continuing to decline, as it did, steadily, for a hundred and fifty years in the last century, it has expanded. Now more of our populations work, and more of us work longer hours than our mothers and fathers. Instead of proving to be "labor saving devices," our machines and computers create more work for more of us to do! Instead of the "problem" of leisure, we face an array of problems caused by overwork, such as families that erode because we have no time to be at home. Even though ours has become the wealthiest nation in history, we languish in a "time famine" with no relief in sight. What happened?
artments of Women's Studies and Rhetoric

Professor of Health, Leisure, and Sport Studies