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Laeserin | 6 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Many poor women didn't marry (that hasn't changed). They lived in service.

Family businesses and especially farms offered an appreciating investment that middle-class women (or their children) maintained access to. And there was social pressure to financially support wives indefinitely, even if you wanted to schtupp the maid, and it was difficult to marry that maid.

Wealthy women had jewels, real estate, property their male relatives held in trust, etc. And, of course, your male relatives were a threat, legal and physical, in their own right.

What has changed is the overemphasis on salaried income. Particularly future salaried income.
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f0xr | 6 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +1 
 Interesting points. I'm not familiar with all that specific data. 

So the main theory is that women being more financially independent makes them more likely to get and stay married? And that women were more financially independent 200 years ago than they are today, which is why marriage is less common and less successful now than in the past?
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Laeserin | 6 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +1 
 I don't know if they were more personally independent, but they had property rights and access to durable goods other than a house, and they could hold these in title.  

(Or on behalf of minor children: a lot of the fuss is about securing inheritance for your own children through something other than a will, rather than letting The New Girl move in and steal or sell their stuff.)
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Laeserin | 6 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +1 
 Modern housewives often own nothing but access to his income stream, and that is a right has been legally eroded (through no-fault divorce and rampant male remarriage, for instance ) and he can more easily cut her off from it or simply protest by ending the pursuit of income. No differently than before, she can best gain access to that stream by simply living with him and lying with him, which leads to "feeling trapped".

Middle class women are being asked to reduce or abandon their income stream (which would raise their fertility and their husbands' income) and rely on his, but he usually doesn't offer compensation for her risk, so she clings to that stream.