“It’s not just a game of bingo, it’s a way of life”: exploring the lived and living experience of women who play bingo

Bingo has been a leisure pastime for women across the United Kingdom since the early twentieth century, with strong ties to community and working-class life. It has also been positioned as a form of gambling, particularly following the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act. Despite its enduring popularity as both a leisure activity and a form of gambling for women, there remains little UK-based research focusing on how women experience and make meaning through bingo participation. This study explores the lived and living experience of women who play bingo, drawing on a narrative approach and the social theory of habitus. Six narrative interviews were conducted with women aged between 20 and 90 years old, based in the North-East of England and Scotland. Participants were invited to describe their experiences of bingo across the life course, from past to present. Through narrative analysis, the findings show that women’s stories of bingo often begin with family and classed introductions to the game, before moving towards present-day evaluations centred on community, play, belonging, and safety. In dialogue with the social theory of habitus and narrative habitus, the findings suggest that bingo is experienced as an accessible and socially acceptable form of leisure; a site of family time, community engagement, and shared support; and a resource of play and pleasure within the field of working-class Britain. This builds on Dixey and Talbot’s (1982) call for research that situates women’s bingo participation within broader understandings of women’s leisure and the opportunities available to working-class women. The study contributes to the under-researched area of qualitative work on women’s gambling, foregrounding lived experience as central to understanding engagement with bingo.