Drawing on a broad range of historical and sociological literature, this book traces the everyday gambling experiences of a diverse group of women. It provides fascinating and original insights into the pleasures afforded to women through their gambling participation and draws on a variety of feminist literature to understand women’s motivations and experience of play, and to examine the ways in which women negotiate their right to gamble without reprimand.
Since gambling tends to be framed within moral discourses of danger and excess, this book offers a defence of women’s decisions to gamble against an often hostile backdrop. It rewrites claims that gambling is ‘meaningless’ and reckless spending, by pointing instead to the highly complex strategies that women who gamble employ. Importantly, it adds to contemporary feminist debates about women’s leisure by showing how women seize control of their lives in order to carve out a time and space for the pursuit of pleasure.