Monica Hesse on the invention of the weekend:
Before weekends could be long, they first had to be weekends.
For most of the 19th century and part of the 20th, there were none — there were simply weeks that ended. The working class had Sundays off only. Because of this, many of them would spend the Lord’s day carousing, then call in sick on Mondays. This practice was observed with enough regularity that it was called “Keeping Saint Mondays.” Religious groups hated it, and so did bosses, writes University of Pennsylvania professor Witold Rybczynski in his leisure-time history, “Waiting for the Weekend.” Various special interest groups put their heads together to come up with a solution: Saturdays. Give the people Saturday afternoon off so they have less reason to be plastered Monday morning.
The term “weekend” first shows up in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1879; it wasn’t until the Great Depression that the Saturday-Sunday dynamic duo really became codified in the United States. Shorter hours were seen as a “remedy” for unemployment, Rybczynski writes. “Each person would work less, but more people would have jobs.”
I think this is a little oversimplified. Certainly the Biblical sabbath was the source of the practice of a day of rest, a dramatic example of the influence of Christianity on the civilization as a whole. This account does explain adding Saturday, which, however, was the Jewish day of rest, not to mention Christian Adventist groups. I wonder if the climate of immigration in the 19th century–all those Jewish immigrants who would not work on Saturday–contributed to the additional day off.
Nevermind that the commandment says “six days shall you labor,” as well as underscoring the one day thou shalt not. I suppose Saturdays became the day people labored for themselves–fixing things around the house, tinkering with this and that, running errands, “getting things done”–as opposed for laboring for someone else for pay. That doubtless helped carve out space for the individual and the home.