How Saturday became a day off
For most of the industrial age, the working week had six days, and Sunday was the day of rest. The two-day weekend that many people now take for granted is largely a twentieth-century arrangement, and it came together in steps.
The first step came in the early nineteenth century in the industrial north of Britain: Saturday afternoon off, from about two o'clock. The case for it was practical. Workers with half a Saturday to themselves, the argument went, would come back on Monday sober and rested. The word followed later. The Oxford English Dictionary finds "weekend" first in a British magazine, Notes and Queries, in 1879.
In the United States, the first five-day week is credited to a New England cotton mill in 1908. It was set up so that the mill's Jewish workers would not have to work on their Sabbath, from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday.
The step that spread the idea came from a car factory. On 1 May 1926, Ford Motor Company moved its factory workers to a five-day, 40-hour week, one of the first American companies to do so, and extended it to office staff that August. Ford said openly that it expected productivity to rise. It also expected people with free time to travel and shop, which meant buying the things factories made.
It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either 'lost time' or a class privilege.
Law caught up during the Depression. The Fair Labor Standards Act, signed in 1938, set a maximum working week of 44 hours, and a 40-hour limit took effect in 1940. Forty hours at eight a day fit into five days, and across the country Saturday joined Sunday.
Nothing about two days is natural. It is the sum of a Sunday kept by tradition, an afternoon won in British mills, a Sabbath made room for, and a factory owner's bet that leisure was good business.
Why did a New England cotton mill introduce a five-day week in 1908?
The two-day weekend was built in steps, by workers, employers and law, and in much of the world it is barely a century old.
