Or sideways. There's this tendency to look at the lower classes of history and assume that since we too are not 'the rich' our behaviour should follow the same

Or sideways. There's this tendency to look at the lower classes of history and assume that since we too are not 'the rich' our behaviour should follow the same patterns of our class in the past. Today, the burden of household work has been cut to 1/10th of what it used to be, jobs are primarily intellectual, and education is paramount. The model to compare against is not the factory worker who was poor in the 1900s, and somehow due to a quirk of history became middle class in the 1950s. We ought to compare against the gentleman class---those who in the 1900s had maids, butlers, personal transportation, and intellectual jobs akin to what we do today: management, clerking, accountancy, licensed professions, etc. In those cases, people married sideways---intellectual women marrying men then helping to run the estate, daughters of merchants marrying other merchants and participating in the businesses, 'professional' socialites giving the entire clan a leg up by creating situations where networking was possible. This is the position we have inherited, and if we must take lessons from the past--we should take lessons from the right class.