Equality in Recreation-ancient of days and now

[joymercy]

Thinking about how a woman should dress according to the bible and the Christian faith, I stumbled upon the question of what would a woman from ancient of days wear to go swimming with her children?

Did women even recreate in the areas spoken about in the bible?

I found that the Romans allowed for women to go swimming in their baths and they even had their own women's and mens areas for this.

Swimming: Swimming in Ancient Rome: Caracalla and Pompeii

Did women in biblical days recreate?

Did they go fishing?

Play games of any kind?

Or were men only allowed to have recreational time and space?

 

[Paidiske]

My hunch - and it's just an off-the-top-of-my-head answer without checking books - is that recreation as we know it would have been something most people, men and women, didn't have much time for. Subsistence agriculture doesn't leave a lot of leisure time for any but the most wealthy. Fishing would have been work. (There's a reason the 8-hour day only became a thing after the industrial revolution!)

There would still have been social activities, and I suspect a lot of creativity was expressed in forms of work - weaving, pottery, even singing while you worked, that sort of thing - but the idea of having a "hobby" I suspect would have been quite foreign to most people.

 

[teresa]

I wonder what beautiful items women of the bible days created with their hands as far as jewelry, clothing or household items like pottery, and if those activities were considered as women's work only?