1. B. de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1724; Penguin edn, 1970), p. 152.
2. See the substantial discussion in N. McKendrick, 'The Commercialization of Fashion' in idem, J. Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (1982), pp. 34-99. A number of eighteenth-century commentators pointed to the importance of changes in fashion for stimulating consumer demand and thence industrial production; on that, see E. L. Jones, 'The Fashion Manipulators' in Business Enterprise and Economic Change, edited by L. P. Cain and P, J. Uselding (Kent, Ohio, 1973); and D. E. Robinson, 'The Importance of Fashions in Taste to Business History: An Introductory Essay' in Business History Review, 37 (1963), pp. 5-36.
3. For women as consumers, see brief comments in L. Davidoff and C. Hall, F amily Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (1987), pp. 29-30, 360-62, 375-80,413-15. T. Veblen's classic The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899
4. ed. C. W. Mills, 1970), esp. pp. 54-55,68-69, 121-27, 242-43, attributes a key, if essentially passive, role to women in his interpretation of conspicuous consumption.
5. M. Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1696), in The First English Feminist: Reflections upon Marriage and Other Writings by Mary Astell, edited by B. Hill (1986), p. 148.