Hedonizing Technologies: Paths to Pleasure in Hobbies and Leisure (review)

Rachel Maines has two principal aims in Hedonizing Technologies. The aim alluded to in the title is to explain the use of numerous technologies more for pleasure than for productivity. The other is to show how changes in textile manufacture moved needlework from the category of work to leisure. The success Maines achieves through devotion to this second goal comes at the expense of neglecting the first.

Maines addresses the recreational practice of needlework in medieval and early modern Europe, Great Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the United States from the colonial period to the present. In so doing, she creates a concise compilation of diverse secondary sources. Anyone who has sorted through the literature on textile crafts will appreciate the morsels Maines has gathered together from antiquarians, curators, enthusiasts, and the small group of historians who have addressed the subject. Maines supplements this summary with primary research, mostly in instructional manuals and fiction. Readers learn why different types of needlework made the switch from work to pleasure at different times, and that recreational needlework spread from a wealthy few to the common people. Maines's recap and extension of the history of needlework is valuable; I hope its audience will find it hiding behind the title Hedonizing Technologies.

The term "hedonize" is awkward. Maines says "hedonistic" did not suit her purposes because technologies cannot be hedonistic. And Maines does grant technologies, and technological change, the agency of "hedonizing" leisure practices. At the same time, Maines says that to use the term "hedonize" is "to denote the process by which the leisure practitioners of technologies change their focus from production and efficiency to personal pleasure" (p. 9). Her shifting between technologies hedonizing leisure and people hedonizing technologies left me confused by this new verb. Through examples over the course of the book, I eventually reached an understanding of "hedonized technologies" as roughly equivalent to recreational technologies that are also productive, e.g., photography and brewing, not television viewing. Maines is sensitive to the tricky nature of this category: whether individuals engaged in productive activities were working or at leisure often comes down to a question of their personal experience, which is difficult to ascertain, especially when it comes to medieval needleworkers.

Such challenges are familiar to the historical and sociological study of recreation, and it is frustrating to watch Maines approach as novel a number of issues that have been discussed at length in the literature on leisure—a literature she cites unevenly and then tosses aside. Steven Gelber, in Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (1999), for instance, explains how hobbies emerged as a distinct type of leisure in the nineteenth century. After Maines dismisses Gelber's analysis as "comical" (p. 11), she uses the term "hobby" indiscriminately. I feel obliged further to mention her criticism of Gelber's coverage of needlework because it is repeated, harsh, and misleading. When I followed her citations, I did not find in Gelber's book what Maines calls his "astonishingly patronizing generalizations" (p. 133), but rather his documentation in primary sources that not everyone in the nineteenth century agreed needlework was a worthwhile leisure activity.

The need for care with terminology and context when chronicling leisure is evident from the subtleties Maines reveals through close examination of needlework. She raises a good point that some pastimes, such as gardening, have existed for centuries. However, there may have been different motivations behind practices that appear similar across time and cultures, and they may have been economically or otherwise contingent. That Maines finds little merit in explanations of leisure that are specific to context strikes me as ahistorical.

This is ultimately a book about leisure, one in which technology is incidental. Maines makes no argument for why it matters that these pastimes were related to technology, ignoring relevant scholarship on technical recreation by Karin Bijsterveld, Joseph Corn, Ruth Oldenziel, and others. For these reasons, the book will interest...