m, in large measure, of a painstaking attention to the service of the master" (3:57). For example, the seeming (alcohol) "abstinence of women is in some part due to an imperative conventionality . . . strongest where the patriarchal tradition the tradition that the woman is a chattel has retained its hold in greatest vigour" (3:71). Thus she wears a corset or as it were "gilded age" clothing as an index of the master's view of womanly beauty on one hand, or as visible proof that she is not a part of the economic arena in which her husband takes part on the other. It has 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" (3:179). The point is that this means she remains a chattel in theory if not in fact. Elsewhere, Veblen says that women are confined "by prescription and by economic circumstances to their 'domestic sphere'" (3:324) and so cannot be taken seriously as thinkers by the men who dominate the economic and social scene. Further, women as a group "are so inhibited by the canons of decency from the ceremonially unclean processes of the lucrative or productive occupations as to make participation in the industrial life process of to day a moral impossibility" (3:342). Significantly, Veblen does not say that women are intellectually incapable of participation in the mainstream, but that their culturally determined roles prevent them from doing so meaningfully. Moreover, he charts a growing sentiment among thinking women that "the whole arrangement of tutelage and vicarious life . . . is somehow a mistake" (3:356), not least because to be an accomplished chattel does (in 1899, when Veblen is writing) not carry the social benefits that it once did. Hence the "New Woman" notions of Emancipation and Work, which, Veblen says, are finally economic and not moral in nature, a reflection of the recognition that women are "excluded by the canons of g...