[Just as Nora and Torvalds relationship can be described in terms of monies earned, owed, and spent, the class to which both of them aspire-the professional, upper-middle, or bourgeois class-can be described in terms of its access to and expenditure of wealth.  Thorstein Veblen (1857-1958), an important fin de sicle  social and economic thinker, argued that many aspects of social life were shaped in large measure by the imperative to demonstrate wealth, the modern measure of power, by expenditure on non-productive leisure.  In this excerpt, Veblen discusses the role of the wife in the display of economic power.]


PECUNIARY EMULATION

     In the sequence of cultural evolution the emergence of a leisure class coincides with the beginning of ownership.  This is necessarily the case, for these two institutions result from the same set of economic forces.  In the inchoate phase of their development they are but different aspects of the same general facts of social structure.
     It is as elements of social structure-conventional facts-that leisure and ownership are matters of interest for the purpose in hand.  An habitual neglect of work does not constitute a leisure class; neither does the mechanical fact of use and consumption constitute ownership.  The present inquiry, therefore, is not concerned with the beginning of indolence, nor with the beginning of the appropriation of useful articles to individual consumption.  The point in question is the origin and nature of a conventional leisure class on the one hand and the beginnings of individual ownership as a conventional right or equitable claim on the other hand.
     The early differentiation out of which the distinction between a leisure and a working class arises is a division maintained between mens and womens work in the lower stages of barbarism.  Likewise the earliest form of ownership is an ownership of the women by the able-bodied men of the community.  The facts may be expressed in more general terms, and truer to the import of the barbarian theory of life, by saying that it is an ownership of the woman by the man.
     There was undoubtedly some appropriation of useful articles before the custom of appropriating women arise.  The usages of existing archaic communities in which there is no ownership of women is warrant for such a view.  In all communities the members, both male and female, habitually appropriate to their individual use a variety of useful things; but these useful things are not thought of as owned by the person who appropriates and consumes them.  The habitual appropriation and consumption of certain slight personal effects goes on without raising the question of ownership; that is to say, the question of a conventional, equitable claim to extraneous things.
     The ownership of women begins in the lower barbarian stages of culture, apparently with the seizure of female captives.  The original reason for the seizure and appropriation of women seems to have been their usefulness as trophies.  The practice of seizing women from the enemy as trophies, gave rise to a form of ownership-marriage, resulting in a household with a male head.  This was followed by an extension of slavery to other captives and inferiors, besides women, and by an extension of ownership-marriage to other women than those seized from the enemy.  The outcome of emulation under the circumstances of a predatory life, therefore, has been on the one hand a form of marriage resting on coercion, and on the other hand the custom of ownership.  The two institutions are not distinguishable in the initial phase of their development; both arise from the desire of the successful men to put their prowess in evidence by exhibiting some durable result of their exploits.  Both also minister to that propensity for mastery which pervades all predatory communities.  From the ownership of women the concept of ownership extends itself to include the products of their industry, and so there arises the ownership of things as well as of persons.
     In this way a consistent system of property in goods is gradually installed.  And although in the latest stages of the development, the serviceability of goods for consumption has come to be the most obtrusive element of their value, still, wealth has by no means yet lost its utility as a honorific evidence of the owners prepotence....
     The end of acquisition and accumulation is conventionally held to be the consumption of the goods accumulated-whether it is consumption directly by the owner of the goods or by the household attached to him and for this purpose identified with him in theory.  This is at least felt to be the economically legitimate end of acquisition, which alone it is incumbent on the theory to take account of.  Such consumption may of course be conceived to serve the consumers physical wants-his physical comfort-or his so-called higher wants-spiritual, aesthetic, intellectual, or what not; the latter class of wants being served indirectly by an expenditure of goods, after the fashion familiar to all economic readers.
     But it is only when taken in a sense far removed from its naive meaning that consumption of goods can be said to afford the incentive from which accumulation invariably proceeds.  The motive that lies at the root of ownership is emulation; and the same motive of emulation continues active in the further development of the institution to which it has given rise and in the development of all those features of the social structure which this institution of ownership touches.  The possession of wealth confers honour; it is an invidious distinction.  Nothing equally cogent can be said for the consumption of goods, nor for any other conceivable incentive to acquisition, and especially not for any incentive to the accumulation of wealth....
     But so soon as the custom of individual ownership begins to gain consistency, the point of view taken in making the invidious comparison on which private property rests will begin to change.  Indeed, the one change is but the reflex of the other.  The initial phase of ownership, the phase of acquisition by naive seizure and conversion, begins to pass into the subsequent stage of an incipient organisation of industry on the basis of private property (in slaves); the horde develops into a more or less self-sufficing industrial community; possessions then come to be valued not so much as evidence of successful foray, but rather as evidence of the prepotence of the possessor of these goods over other individuals within the community.  The invidious comparison now becomes primarily a comparison of the owner with the other members of the group.  Property is still of the nature of trophy, but, with the cultural advance, it becomes more and more a trophy of successes scored in the game of ownership carried on between the members of the group under the quasi-peaceable methods of nomadic life.
     Gradually, as industrial activity further displaces predatory activity in the communitys everyday life and in mens habits of thought, accumulated property more and more replaces trophies of predatory exploit as the conventional exponent of prepotence and success.  With the growth of settled industry, therefore, the possession of wealth gains in relative importance and effectiveness as a customary basis of repute and esteem....
     So soon as the possession of property becomes the basis of popular esteem, therefore, it becomes also a requisite to that complacency which we call self-respect.  In any community where goods are held in severalty it is necessary, in order to his own peace of mind, that an individual should possess as large a portion of goods as others with whom he is accustomed to class himself; and it is extremely gratifying to possess something more than others.  But as fast as a person makes new acquisitions, and becomes accustomed to the resulting new standard of wealth, the new standard forthwith ceases to afford appreciably greater satisfaction than the earlier standard did.  The tendency in any case is constantly to make the present pecuniary standard the point of departure for a fresh increase of wealth; and this in turn gives rise to a new standard of sufficiency and a new pecuniary classification of ones self as compared with ones neighbours.  So far as concerns the present question, the end sought by accumulation is to rank high in comparison with the rest of the community in point of pecuniary strength.  So long as the comparison is distinctly unfavourable to himself, the normal, average individual will live in chronic dissatisfaction with his present lot; and when he has reached what may be called the normal pecuniary standard of the community, or of his class in the community, this chronic dissatisfaction will give place to a restless straining to place a wider and ever-widening pecuniary interval between himself and this average standard.  The invidious comparison can never become so favourable to the individual making it that he would not gladly rate himself still higher relatively to his competitors in the struggle for pecuniary reputability.
     In the nature of the case, the desire for wealth can scarcely be satiated in any individual instance, and evidently a satiation of the average or general desire for wealth is out of the question.  However widely, or equally, or fairly, it may be distributed, no general increase of the communitys wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel every one else in the accumulation of goods.  If, as is sometimes assumed, the incentive to accumulation were the want of subsistence or of physical comfort, then the aggregate economic wants of a community might conceivably be satisfied at some point in the advance of industrial efficiency; but since the struggle is substantially a race for reputability on the basis of an invidious comparison, no approach to a definitive attainment is possible.
     What has just been said must not be taken to mean that there are no other incentives to acquisition and accumulation than this desire to excel in pecuniary standing and so gain the esteem and envy of ones fellow-men.  The desire for added comfort and security from want is present as a motive at every stage of the process of accumulation in a modern industrial community; although the standard of sufficiency in these respects is in turn greatly affected by the habit of pecuniary emulation.  To a great extent this emulation shapes the methods and selects the objects of expenditure for personal comfort and decent livelihood.
     Besides this, the power conferred by wealth also affords a motive to accumulation....  Relative success, tested by an invidious pecuniary comparison with other men, becomes the conventional end of action.  The currently accepted legitimate end of effort becomes the achievement of a favourable comparison with other men; and therefore the repugnance to futility to a good extend coalesces with the incentive of emulation.  It acts to accentuate the struggle for pecuniary reputability by visiting with a sharper disapproval all shortcoming and all evidence of shortcoming in point of pecuniary success.  Purposeful effort comes to mean, primarily, effort directed to or resulting in a more creditable showing of accumulated wealth.  Among the motives which lead men to accumulate wealth, the primacy, both in scope and intensity, therefore, continues to belong to this motive of pecuniary emulation.
     In making use of the term invidious, it may perhaps be unnecessary to remark, there is no intention to extol or depreciate, or to commend or deplore any of the phenomena which the word is used to characterise.  The term is used in a technical sense as describing a comparison of persons with a view to rating and grading them in respect of relative worth or value-in an aesthetic or moral sense-and so awarding and defining the relative degrees of complacency with which they may legitimately be contemplated by themselves and by others.  An invidious comparison is a process of valuation of persons in respect of worth....
     Even if the institution of a leisure class had not come in with the first emergence of individual ownership, by force of the dishonour attaching to productive employment, it would in any case have come in as one of the early consequences of ownership.  And it is to be remarked that while the leisure class existed in theory from the beginning of predatory culture, the institution takes on a new and fuller meaning with the transition from the predatory to the next succeeding pecuniary stage of culture.  It is from this time fourth a leisure class in fact as well as in theory.  From this point dates the institution of the leisure class in its consummate form....
     Abstention from labour is not only a honorific or meritorious act, but it presently comes to be a requisite of decency.  The insistence on property as the basis of reputability is very naive and very imperious during the early stages of the accumulation of wealth.  Abstention from labour is the conventional evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing; and this insistence on the meritoriousness of wealth leads to a more strenuous insistence on leisure.  Nota notoe est nota rei ipsius.  According to well-established laws of human nature, prescription presently seizes upon this conventional evidence of wealth and fixes it in mens habits of thought as something that is in itself substantially meritorious and ennobling; while productive labour at the same time and by a like process becomes in a double sense intrinsically unworthy.  Prescription ends by making labour not only disreputable in the eyes of the community, but morally impossible to the noble, freeborn man, and incompatible with a worthy life.
     This tabu on labour has a further consequence in the industrial differentiation of classes.  As the population increases in density and the predatory group grows into a settled industrial community, the constituted authorities and the customs governing ownership gain in scope and consistency.  It then presently becomes impracticable to accumulate wealth by simple seizure, and, in logical consistency, acquisition by industry is equally impossible for high-minded and impecunious men.  The alternative open to them is beggary or privation.  Wherever the canon of conspicuous leisure has a chance undisturbed to work out its tendency, there will therefore emerge a secondary, and in a sense spurious, leisure class-abjectly poor and living a precarious life of want and discomfort, but morally unable to stoop to gainful pursuits.  The decayed gentleman and the lady who has seen better days are by no means unfamiliar phenomena even now.  This pervading sense of the indignity of the slightest manual labour is familiar to all civilised peoples, as well as to peoples of a less advanced pecuniary culture.  In persons of delicate sensibility, who have long been habituated to gentle manners, the sense of the shamefulness of manual labour may become so strong that, at a critical juncture, it will even set aside the instinct of self-preservation.  So, for instance, we are told of certain Polynesian chiefs, who, under the stress of good form, preferred to starve rather than carry their food to their mouths with their own hands.  It is true, this conduct may have been due, at least in part, to an excessive sanctity or tabu attaching to the chiefs person.  The tabu would have been communicated by the contact of his hands, and so would have made anything touched by him unfit for human food.  But the tabu is itself a derivative of the unworthiness or moral incompatibility of labour; so that even when construed in this sense the conduct of the Polynesian chiefs is truer to the canon of honorific leisure than would at first appear....
     It has already been remarked that the term leisure, as here used, does not connote indolence or quiescence.  What it connotes is non-productive consumption of time.  Time is consumed non-productively (1) from a sense of the unworthiness of productive work, and (2) as an evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness.  But the whole of the life of the gentleman of leisure is not spent before the eyes of the spectators who are to be impressed with that spectacle of honorific leisure which in the ideal scheme makes up his life.  For some part of the time his life is perforce withdrawn from the public eye, and of this portion which is spent in private the gentleman of leisure should, for the sake of his good name, be able to give a convincing account.  He should find some means of putting in evidence the leisure that is not spent in the sight of the spectators.  This can be done only indirectly, through the exhibition of some tangible, lasting results of the leisure so spent-in a manner analogous to the familiar exhibition of tangible, lasting products of the labour performed for the gentleman of leisure by handicraftsmen and servants in his employ....
     The origin, or better the derivation, of manners is, no doubt, to be sought elsewhere than in a conscious effort on the part of the well-mannered to show that much time has been spent in acquiring them.  The proximate end of innovation and elaboration has been the higher effectiveness of the new departure in point of beauty or of expressiveness.  In great part the ceremonial code of decorous usages owes it beginning and its growth to the desire to conciliate or to show good will, as anthropologists and sociologists are in the habit of assuming, and this initial motive is rarely if ever absent from the conduct of well-mannered persons at any stage of the later development.  Manners, we are told, are in part an elaboration of gesture, and in part they are symbolical and conventionalised survivals representing former acts of dominance or of personal service or of personal contact.  In large part they are an expression of the relation of status,-a symbolic pantomime of mastery on the one hand and of subservience on the other.  Wherever at the present time the predatory habit of mind, and the consequent attitude of mastery and of subservience, gives its character to the accredited scheme of life, there the importance of all punctilios of conduct is extreme, and the assiduity with which the ceremonial observance of rank and titles is attended to approaches closely to the ideal set by the barbarian of the quasi-peaceable nomadic culture.  Some of the Continental countries afford good illustrations of this spiritual survival.  In these communities the archaic ideal is similarly approached as regards the esteem accorded to manners as a fact of intrinsic worth.
     Decorum set out with being symbol and pantomime and with having utility only as an exponent of the facts and qualities symbolised; but it presently suffered the transmutation which commonly passes over symbolical facts in human intercourse.  Manners presently came, in popular apprehension, to be possessed of a substantial utility in themselves; they acquired a sacramental character, in great measure independent of the facts which they originally prefigured.  Deviations from the code of decorum have become intrinsically odious to all men, and good breeding is, in everyday apprehension, not simply an adventitious mark of human excellence, but an integral feature of the worthy human soul.  There are few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum; and so far have we progressed in the direction of imputing intrinsic utility to the ceremonial observances of etiquette that few of us, if any, can dissociate an offence against etiquette from a sense of the substantial unworthiness of the offender.  A breach of faith may be condoned, but a breach of decorum cannot.  Manners maketh man.
     None the less, while manners have this intrinsic utility, in the apprehension of the performer and the beholder alike, this sense of the intrinsic rightness of decorum is only the proximate ground of the vogue of manners and breeding.  Their ulterior, economic ground is to be sought in the honorific character of that leisure or non-productive employment of time and effort without which good manners are not acquired.  The knowledge and habit of good form come only by long-continued use.  Refined tastes, manners, and habits of life are a useful evidence of gentility, because good breeding requires, application, and expense, and can therefore not be compassed by those whose time and energy are taken up with work.  A knowledge of good form is prima facie  evidence that that portion of the well-bred persons life which is not spent under the observation of the spectator has been worthily spent in acquiring accomplishments that are of no lucrative effect.  In the last analysis the value of manners lies in the fact that they are the voucher of a life of leisure.  Therefore, conversely, since leisure is the conventional means of pecuniary repute, the acquisition of some proficiency in decorum is incumbent on all who aspire to a modicum of pecuniary decency....
     Personal service is still an element of great economic importance, especially as regards the distribution and consumption of goods; but its relative importance even in this direction is no doubt less than it once was.  The best development of this vicarious leisure lies in the past rather than in the present; and its best expression in the present is to be found in the scheme of life of the upper leisure class.  To this class the modern culture owes much in the way of the conservation of traditions, usages, and habits of thought which belong on a more archaic cultural plane, so far as regards their widest acceptance and their most effective development.
     In the modern industrial communities the mechanical contrivances available for the comfort and convenience of everyday life are highly developed.  So much so that body servants, or, indeed, domestic servants of any kind, would now scarcely be employed by anybody except on the ground of a canon of reputability carried over by tradition from earlier usage.  The only exception would be servants employed to attend on the persons of the infirm and the feeble-minded.  But such servants properly come under the head of trained nurses rather than under that of domestic servants, and they are, therefore, an apparent rather than a real exception to the rule.
     The proximate reason for keeping domestic servants, for instance, in the moderately well-to-do household of to-day, is (ostensibly) that the members of the household are unable without discomfort to compass the work required by such a modern establishment.  And the reason for their being unable to accomplish it is (1) that they have too many social duties, and (2) that the work to be done is too severe and that there is too much of it.  These two reasons may be restated as follows:  (1) Under a mandatory code of decency, the time and effort of the members of such a household are required to be ostensibly all spent in a performance of conspicuous leisure, in the way of calls, drives, clubs, sewing-circles, sports, charity organisations, and other like social functions.  Those persons whose time and energy are employed in these matters privately avow that all these observances, as well as the incidental attention to dress and other conspicuous consumptions, are very irksome but altogether unavoidable.  (2) Under the requirement of conspicuous consumption of goods, the apparatus of living has grown so elaborate and cumbrous, in the way of dwellings, furniture, bric-a-brac, wardrobe and meals, that the consumers of these things cannot make way with them in the required manner without help.  Personal contact with the hired persons whose aid is called in to fulfil the routine of decency is commonly distasteful to the occupants of the house, but their presence is endured and paid for, in order to delegate to them a share in this onerous consumption of household goods.  The presence of domestic servants, and of the special class of body servants in an eminent degree, is a concession of physical comfort to the moral need of pecuniary decency.
     The largest manifestation of vicarious leisure in modern life is made up of what are called domestic duties.  These duties are fast becoming a species of services performed, not so much for the individual behoof of the head of the household as for the reputability of the household taken as a corporate unit-a group of which the housewife is a member on a footing of ostensible equality.  As fast as the household for which they are performed departs from its archaic basis of ownership-marriage, these household duties of course tend to fall out of the category of vicarious leisure in the original sense; except so far as they are performed by hired servants.  That is to say, since vicarious leisure is possible only on a basis of status or of hired service, the disappearance of the relation of status from human intercourse at any point carries with it the disappearance of vicarious leisure so far as regards that much of life.  But it is to be added, in qualification of this qualification, that so long as the household subsists, even with a divided head, this class of non-productive labour performed for the sake of household reputability must still be classed as vicarious leisure, although in a slightly altered sense.  It is now leisure performed for the quasi-personal corporate household, instead of, as formerly, for the proprietary head of the household....
     With the disappearance of servitude, the number of vicarious consumers attached to any one gentle-man tends, on the whole, to decrease.  The like is of course true, and perhaps in a still higher degree, of the number of dependents who perform vicarious leisure for him.  In a general way, though not wholly nor consistently, these two groups coincide.  The dependent who was first delegated for these duties was the wife, of the chief wife; and, as would be expected, in the later development of the institution, when the number of persons by whom these duties are customarily performed gradually narrows, the wife remains the last.  In the higher grades of society a large volume of both these kinds of service is required; and here the wife is of course still assisted in the work by a more or less numerous corps of menials.  But as we descend the social scale, the point is presently reached where the duties of vicarious leisure and consumption devolve upon the wife alone.  In the communities of the Western culture, this point is at present found among the lower middle class.
     And here occurs a curious inversion.  It is a fact of common observation that in this lower middle class there is no pretence of leisure on the part of the head of the household.  Through force of circumstances it has fallen into disuse.  But the middle-class wife still carries on the business of vicarious leisure, for the good name of the household and its master.  In descending the social scale in any modern industrial community, the primary fact-the conspicuous leisure of the master of the household-disappears at a relatively high point.  The head of the middle-class household has been reduced by economic circumstances to turn his hand to gaining a livelihood by occupations which often partake largely of the character of industry, as in the case of the ordinary business man of to-day.  But the derivative fact-the vicarious leisure and consumption rendered by the wife, and the auxiliary vicarious performance of leisure by menials-remains in vogue as a conventionality which the demands of reputability will not suffer to be slighted.  It is by no means an uncommon spectacle to find a man applying himself to work with the utmost assiduity, in order that his wife may in due form render for him that degree of vicarious leisure which the common sense of the time demands.
     The leisure rendered by the wife in such cases is, of course, not a simple manifestation of idleness or indolence.  It almost invariably occurs disguised under some form of work or household duties or social amenities, which prove on analysis to serve little or no ulterior end beyond showing that she does not and need not occupy herself with anything that is gainful or that is of substantial use.  As has already been noticed under the head of manners, the greater part of the customary round of domestic cares to which the middle-class housewife gives her time and effort is of this character.  Not that the results of her attention to household matters, of a decorative and mundificatory character, are not pleasing to the sense of men trained in middle-class proprieties; but the taste to which these effects of household adornment and tidiness appeal is a taste which has been formed under the selective guidance of a canon of propriety that demands just these evidences of wasted effort.  The effects are pleasing to us chiefly because we have been taught to find them pleasing.  There goes into these domestic duties much solicitude for a proper combination of form and colour, and for other ends that are to be classed as aesthetic in the proper sense of the term; and it is not denied that effects having some substantial aesthetic value are sometimes attained.  Pretty much all that is here insisted on is that, as regards these amenities of life, the housewifes efforts are under the guidance of traditions that have been shaped by the law of conspicuously wasteful expenditure of time and substance.  If beauty or comfort is achieved,-and it is a more or less fortuitous circumstance if they are,-they much be achieved by means and methods that commend themselves to the great economic law of wasted effort.  The more reputable, presentable portion of middle-class household paraphernalia are, on the one hand, items of conspicuous consumption, and on the other hand, apparatus for putting in evidence the vicarious leisure rendered by the housewife.

From Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), reissued New York: Penguin, 1979, 22-34, 39-49, 64-67, 80-88, 102-10.