“The dress of women [of the leisure class] goes even farther than that of men in the way of demonstrating the wearer’s abstinence from productive employment.  It needs no argument to enforce the generalization that the more elegant styles of feminine bonnets go even farther towards making work impossible than does a man’s high hat.  The woman’s show adds the so-called French heel to the evidence of enforced leisure afforded by its polish; because this high heel obviously makes any, even the simplest and most necessary manual work extremely difficult.  The like is true even in a higher degree of the skirt and the rest of the drapery which characterizes women’s dress.  The substantial reason for our tenacious attachment to the skirt is just this: it is expensive and it hampers the wearer at every turn and incapacitates her for all useful exertion. . . .

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 sustained is chiefly 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 be the sole economic function of woman.”

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899