Feminists

My example, however, was that aristocratic MEN began to marry women whose families were middle class because of money. These men had titles and land but no money when the industrial revolution changed GB from a rural to urban society. Until the 1880s, married women had no right to their own property or assets, so marrying a female with money meant the husband became the owner of her property or assets.

So, the "fantasy" was that these aristocratic males married middle-class females for love - but the reality, often, was that these marriages were family transactions - the aristocratic family got cash to pay taxes on estates and the middle-class one got a family member with a title and entrée into aristocratic circles to help other members of that family gain access to titles, etc.

Not to say a female saw herself in that way - but some surely knew what was expected of them - but that was a reality. Then, the aristocratic male would have sex with whomever he pleased and actually love someone else - not necessarily the female who was his wife. Divorce was not an option. The female provided an heir to the family, for both sides, and made her family more upwardly mobile.

Not all marriages were like this, but the reality is that marriage has been about things other than love for most of its existence - among royalty, aristocrats and the middle class. No one really cared about the poor one way or another in this regard - ever.

Marie Antoinette married Louis to seal a political alliance b/t France and the HRE. The French Revolution came about because a middle class in France was expected to pay for the extravagance of the aristocracy and royalty (including funding wars like our own Revolution to spite GB.) The poor didn't start the French Revolution - it was a newly-emerged middle class (lawyers, scholars) that wanted a piece of the power in government decisions - like who pays taxes. Just like here, now, the elite didn't think they should pay taxes to fund the state. A lot of them lost their lives, not just their property, for their inability to compromise.

In GB, aristocrats made room for the middle class a little more readily - often by "political alliances" that allowed the middle class to marry into the aristocracy.

Aristocrats did not start nor propel the industrial revolution. Jenny Uglow wrote a great book called Lunar Men that talks about the beginnings of the scientific revolution. The men who did this were not at Cambridge and Oxford - those universities taught the classics, philosophy, etc. - and they were closed off to anyone who wasn't part of the Church of England. Dissenters like Joseph Priestly (the founder of Unitarianism) and middle-class inventors created the wealth of the scientific/industrial revolution. Aristocrats were supposed to govern everyone else, not earn money by work.

Women, historically, could either get married or join a religious order or live with her family and take care of her parents as they aged and then move in with another family member when her parents died. She couldn't hold a job or earn her own keep and be respectable. A VERY FEW did - earn money as governesses - but, even then they were controlled by another family.

Schools as we know them didn't start until the dissenters (anyone who wasn't anglican church) wanted people to learn to read so that they could interpret the bible for themselves and, just as importantly, if not more so, to encourage sobriety because factory work needed sober workers much more than farm work did.

Universal education (for males, initially) didn't come about until the industrial revolution needed workers who could read instructions. So, even then, schools were by and for males more often than not.

Women didn't have choices. Their entire lives were determined by the men they married. Of course women wanted to marry males who wouldn't leave them and their children (because birth control was also not an option) destitute. Women in the work force after marriage is an invention of the 1960s and 70s.