Perceptions of women’s public leisure: social reactions to women dining alone in cafés and restaurants in Woldia, Ethiopia

Abstract

This study examines women’s public leisure in Woldia Town, Ethiopia, focusing on experiences of dining and spending time alone in cafés, restaurants and small hotels. Woldia is a medium-sized town in northern Ethiopia with a growing hospitality sector that serves as an important site for examining gendered public leisure practices. The town’s cultural and religious norms, coupled with traditional gender expectations, shape perceptions of women’s presence in public spaces. Using a phenomenologically informed qualitative approach, data were collected using semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and non-participant observations from a total of 26 participants (12 women, 10 male community members and 4 hospitality workers). The study is guided by feminist leisure theory and gendered space perspectives, emphasising how power, visibility, and respectability shape women’s experiences in public leisure environments. The findings indicate that women face visible and socially enforced forms of surveillance and informal social control, including overt staring, questioning, and persistent social monitoring, demonstrating that surveillance operates as an explicit and socially intrusive form of gendered regulation in everyday leisure settings. These practices illustrate how informal social control operates as a mechanism of gendered surveillance in everyday urban life. The findings are analysed through three interrelated dimensions: gendered surveillance, emotional labour, and negotiated agency. These dimensions function as interconnected processes through which gendered power is reproduced in everyday leisure settings. The study contributes to feminist leisure scholarship by demonstrating how public leisure in medium-sized Global South towns operates as a site of social surveillance, negotiated participation, and incremental social change, where repeated everyday practices gradually reshape gendered boundaries in public leisure.