th in the past and
in the present.

As has been seen in the discussion of woman's status under the heads
of Vicarious Leisure and Vicarious Consumption, it has in the course
of economic development become the office of the woman to consume
vicariously for the head of the household; and her apparel is contrived
with this object in view. It has come about that obviously productive
labor is in a peculiar degree derogatory to respectable women, and
therefore special pains should be taken in the construction of women's
dress, to impress upon the beholder the fact (often indeed a fiction)
that the wearer does not and can not habitually engage in useful work.
Propriety requires respectable women to abstain more consistently from
useful effort and to make more of a show of leisure than the men of the
same social classes. It grates painfully on our nerves to contemplate
the necessity of any well-bred woman's earning a livelihood by useful
work. It is not "woman's sphere." Her sphere is within the household,
which she should "beautify," and of which she should be the "chief
ornament." The male head of the household is not currently spoken of as
its ornament. This feature taken in conjunction with the other fact that
propriety requires more unremitting attention to expensive display in
the dress and other paraphernalia of women, goes to enforce the view
already implied in what has gone before. By virtue of its descent from a
patriarchal past, our social system makes it the woman's function in
an especial degree to put in evidence her household's ability to pay.
According to the modern civilized scheme of life, the good name of the
household to which she belongs should be the special care of the woman;
and the system of honorific expenditure and conspicuous leisure by which
this good name is chiefly sustained is therefore the woman's sphere.
In the ideal scheme, as it tends to realize itself in the life of
the higher pecuniary classes, this attention to conspicuous waste of
substance and effort should normally be the sole economic function of
the woman.

At the stage of economic development at which the women were still in
the full sense the property of the men, the performance of conspicuous
leisure and consumption came to be part of the services required of
them. The women being not their own masters, obvious expenditure and
leisure on their part would redound to the credit of their master rather
than to their own credit; and t