A sharp distinction between leisure and consumption was relatively new. It arose with the separation of home and male work, the changing nature of work, the American sanctification of the home and its domestic space, and the rise of temperance in particular and evangelical reform in general. In the workshops of antebellum America, work went on amidst gambling, socializing, singing, storytelling, debating, and drinking. Men wandered in and out of the workplace. As employers, particularly in the new factories of the Gilded Age, took greater control of work, they, as buyers of their workers’
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