riedan's Feminine Mystique, which set off the late-20th-century women's movement by arguing as fraud the myth that women could (or should) rely on received wisdom to justify their lives:
By . . . the promise of magical fulfillment through marriage, the feminine mystique arrests their development at an infantile level, short of personal identity, with an inevitably weak core of self (Friedan 290).
Thus wrote Friedan in 1962. Eighty years earlier--and seven years before Veblen's critique--the social dynamic of infantilizing and enslaving women was captured by Gilman in "The Yellow Wallpaper," which charts the clinical dissociation of a woman denied participation (never mind fulfillment) in her marriage. In Women in Economics, published a year before Veblen's Leisure Class, Gilman deplores the culturally enforced dependency of women upon men, the barbarity of which is exposed when women not attached to men attempt to earn their own livelihood:
None can deny these patent facts--that the economic status of women generally depends upon that
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