One difference will be that in the time you speak of, a person could just leave and start over. More recently, people had several major chances to reinvent the

One difference will be that in the time you speak of, a person could just leave and start over. More recently, people had several major chances to reinvent themselves early in life, as they went off to college or to work. Most of the world was not in your small hometown. Increasingly, though, there will be no place to go where you are unknown, and there's no frontier to go to if the social pressure becomes unbearable.