Projecting the idea of a distinctive female demand in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century England was a groundbreaking departure in the history of marketing. The pioneers were the booksellers and printers who addressed specialist titles to the ladies in the 1600s, while the post-1688 print boom saw the publication of custom-designed ladies' pocket diaries, a proliferation of female manuals of all kinds, the Female Spectator in the 1740s and the long-running Lady's Magazine from 1770. The leap to objects was made when leading furniture makers started classifying furniture by the sex, age, and specialist needs of the implied user in the new illustrated catalogs of the 1760s. Of course, sex distinctions in clothes are as old as civilization, while the idea of furniture suited to female needs is not unprecedented (think of birthing stools), but making difference systematic and concrete by means of word, image, and object was a decisive innovation. The rapid diffusion of ladies' and gentlemen's furniture suggests that gender distinctions already resonated powerfully with male and female consumers, but in the extension of the range of differentiated furniture, the projection of the trope by manufacturers thereafter, and its acceptance by consumers, conventional ideas of masculine importance and feminine delicacy were amplified and fixed. In the process, femininity was expressed in a specific and narrowly defined aesthetic register.