marriage: a survival tool for women

After discussing the role of marriage in class today, I began to think about the role of a woman in Jane Austen's time which spiraled into the differences of social classes and marrying as a means to survive, not because you love someone. Austen paints a great picture of what it is like to be a woman in the early 19th century with her characters of Mrs. Bennet, her daughters, Miss Bingley, Lady Catherine, and so on but Austen also shows what struggles occur between different social classes. She does this by using marriage as a way to mask the issues between those of a lower and higher class and how to survive after your family's support is gone. Charlotte is the best example of this. Her engagement to Mr. Collins, who had originally proposed marriage to Lizzy and moves on to Charlotte when Lizzy rejects him, uses marriage to avoid becoming an "old maid" and securing a future for herself. This also happens with Lizzy later on but I have a kindle and no page numbers so I won't give details in case I've read ahead :) . This practice of marriage as a means to survive is what women had to face as they got older and unfortunately, marrying the first person to ask was what they had to do to secure a favorable future and to lessen the worry on their family.