A HISTORY OF VACATIONS Are We There Yet? Volume I Issue 6
A HISTORY OF VACATIONS
Are We There Yet?
Volume I Issue 6
The Evolution of the Reason for Vacations
As previously mentioned, the idea of taking time off from work was an anathema to the pre Mid-Eighteenth Century population. But as time and ideas shifted more and more toward the idea of vacations, weekend getaways and summer travel, the very reasons for such a departure from previous thinking had to evolve from a more logical response to this urge into today’s reason of a break from work for relaxation and enjoyment.
Child Driven (needed at home, time off from school for various reasons).
Interestingly, when this discussion is completed, we will see that Child Driven vacations will complete the circle – from the first to the last of the reasons for vacations.
The vacation, understood either as time free from work and other obligations like school and family care, or as time away from home in leisure pursuits, was rare for almost all children until the twentieth century. And yet in the last half of the twentieth century vacations increasingly became associated with the child in affluent societies.
Vacations, in contrast to times of seasonal or trade unemployment or migration away from home for work, were and are largely unknown in agrarian and pre-industrial urban societies. Not only were children necessary for daily farming and craft routines, but the idea that the young needed or deserved extended times free from work did not exist in these societies. The childhood vacation was a by-product of changes in work time requirements of households, increased affluence, and new attitudes about children’s needs and rights to play and experience.
The expansion of children’s access to schooling in the nineteenth century and the creation of annual break periods did not create the modern childhood vacation of rest and nonacademic explorations. Rather, these “vacation” periods were times when child labor, bad weather, or budgetary restraints prevented school from being open. School breaks varied greatly in the nineteenth century: in the United States urban schools had as little as one month’s closure, while rural districts could have breaks of up to nine months in total. Often schools were closed not to give children rest, but because roads were poor in winter or because children were needed for spring planting and autumn harvests. Vacation periods depended on the local economy. Wheat farming required little child labor, but corn, tobacco, sugar beets, and cotton placed heavy seasonal demands on children’s time. Schools, especially in urban areas, were often open in summer as well as winter. And unlike today’s trend of vacation packages and deals, and family vacations to faraway destinations, these getaways involved the children simply going home.
In the 1840s, schools were open in New York City up to 242 days of the year. Gradually, beginning with the common school movement of Horace Mann in the 1840s, reformers won an increase in the day’s schools were in session in rural areas. On average, the American school year increased from 132 in 1870 to 162 days by 1920. At the same time, urban areas saw the elimination of summer classes because of poor attendance, inefficient learning on hot days, and parental pressure, especially in the middle classes, to make children available for family vacations.
State laws gradually produced the “standard” of the ten-week to three-month summer vacation in the twentieth century (with 180 days of schooling per year) as differences between rural and urban school terms diminished. To compensate for longer school terms, Mann and subsequent reformers advocated regular holiday periods to provide children with outdoor experience and rest from school routine. By this is meant they felt that a summer spent away from familiar surroundings, but involving some other destinations (such as a farm for city dwellers and perhaps a seashore for farm children).
Breaking from the History of Vacations in America briefly, in Europe and elsewhere, the length of children’s summer vacations similarly varied by the demands of work and budget in the nineteenth century. By the 2000s, these holiday periods were generally shorter than in the United States, though intermediate vacations (in spring and mid-winter) were often longer. While Japan remains at the extreme end of the spectrum in the 2000s, with a school year of 243 days and a short August vacation, European school children attended classes across a range from 216 to the American standard of 180. Despite the efforts of school reformers in the 1920s and after to extend school time in the United States through July or begin school before Labor Day, parents resisted, claiming a shortened break would interfere with family vacations and other worthy activities like summer camps and sports.
For all of the articles on The History Of Vacations visit
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A History Of Vacations: Volume 1, Issue 2
A HISTORY OF VACATIONS
Are We There Yet?
Volume I Issue 2
As we continue our History Of Vacations I’d like to clarify that the discussion will mostly center on the History of Vacations in America. We’ll cover the subject from the point in time when vacations were not part of the American lexicon, through the earliest evolutionary period when only the most elite class of Americans traveled, until the present time through the development of family vacations, week-end getaways, summer time vacations and vacation packages.
It may seem difficult to image these days, but in times past it was almost unthinkable for anyone to take a vacation. The members of a usual family unit – father, mother, children all had “occupations”. In fact, the father was known by his occupation. “What do you do” was as common an introduction question as “what is your name” (a distinction still made often today). Mothers, for the most part, were stay-at-home moms; her life (and occupation) was caring for her family. And the children went to school.
Vacations were time spent away from their occupations. In fact, in an agrarian society, there was never any time available to take a vacation. Whether it was animal or crops or equipment or care of the land, none of
these could wait or be allowed to go untended to for even a day, much less a weekend and certainly not a week. Additionally, travel was expensive and most families simply did not have the funds to “get away”, even if their
occupations provided them with the time to do so.
There was also the general work ethic, stemming from our Puritan roots, that said people worked six days a week and then rested on the seventh. And on that seventh day, it was normally spent by going to church and hearing from the pulpit about how good it is to work, how idleness is a vice and how The Lord spent six days doing creation’s work and rested only on the seventh. So work was good, leisure was not.
About this time, the early years of the 19th century, doctors were beginning to recognize and say that it was important to get away for health reasons as they could see in their businessmen patients the resultant “brain fatigue” and burnout caused by working continuously. As more and more people began to listen to this advice, the church countered with providing a purpose for the use of leisure time with church sponsored retreats, camps and religious resorts. Of course, idleness was still perceived as analogous to drunkenness and other vices so that these resorts and camps provided
religious activities that forbade drinking, smoking and other temptations of idle time.
There was also a problem of travel. Automobiles had not come into being at this period of time. Travel choices were horse or horse and buggy for destinations within a day’s ride. Railways were in their early stages and still mostly used for cargo and also fairly local in their range of travel (the final link-up of tracks traversing the U.S. from coast to coast was not accomplished until 1869). And there were ships, which for travel were time-consuming and costly for oceanic voyages and for travel within the U.S. they only provided service north and south on the larger river systems usually
with paddle-wheel vessels.
The more affluent did travel, often extensively, but they were not called vacations, at least not as we understand it. The primary purpose for their travel was normally one of education. Children were often taken (or sent) abroad to further their understanding of other cultures and civilizations. Primary destinations for Americans tended to be Great Britain, Europe and the Far East in that order. The belief was that a greater understanding of other societies would enhance their life experience, enabling them to be more successful in their lives when they returned to America and embarked
on adult-hood and careers.
A segment of this section of American society also believed that those in their financial condition had a responsibility to serve the public, either through elected or appointed office. And knowledge and understanding of the rest of the world would enhance their effectiveness in that endeavor. They recognized earlier than the rest of society that we were part of a “Global Community”.
Next issue we will explore the role the railroads played in the creation of the vacation industry, how the American psyche began accepting the value of family vacations and how the change from an agrarian society to an industrial one contributed to the birth of vacations, as we know them today.
For all of the articles on The History Of Vacations visit
httpss://rooms101.com/vacation/history-of-vacations