A lot of women's lives actually were miserable, whether you care to believe it or not. And so were a lot of men's lives, if they ended up with an ill-tempered, or lazy, or alcoholic wife -- they were effectively prevented from dumping her, no matter how richly she may have deserved it, or how miserable she was making him and the children. A society that offered basically no accepted alternatives to a husband-wife-and-their-children living arrangement, made life miserable for the many people who weren't happy in that arrangement, for whatever reason.
My maternal grandmother, whose father had been a successful small town banker, had a shotgun marriage to an alcoholic who beat her regularly. She divorced him when my mother was about 4, and went home to her small town with her tail between her legs, eventually marrying a sympathetic widower, not for love, but because it was the Depression, and he was willing and had one of the few secure jobs around (assistant postmaster). My mother didn't know her real birthdate until after she graduated from high school, and had to provide official identification documentation when she went to work as an Air Force secretary, because the fact that she had been conceived before the marriage had to be kept a deep dark secret.
My maternal grandmother's sister married by the rules, to a high school football coach who later became a high school principal. Their life looked perfect, nice little suburban house, husband providing a secure and sufficient income, wife a full-time homemaker, nice daughter who grew up to go to nursing school. Unfortunately, this great aunt was debilitatingly depressed after she had to move away from the small town where she'd grown up, because her husband got a new job hundreds of miles away. She simply had no choice but to leave all her friends and relatives behind, even though she desperately wanted not to. She was subjected to electroshock therapy as an attempted cure. She didn't seem terribly depressed when I knew her many years after that, but as her daughter (who was old enough to remember her mother "before") put it, after the electroshock therapy she always seemed sort of "dull" (not meaning stupid, but emotionless and having no sense of purpose -- I remember her as having a sort of Stepford wife disposition, always pleasant, but not quite all there). It didn't help that her husband wanted her to be a Stepford wife. He made her give up playing the violin after they got married, and would never permit her to learn to drive.
My paternal grandmother had a nice marriage for a while, to a successful popular author, but then he ran off after they had two young sons (decades later, my father turned up several sets of half-siblings in various states). My father remembers her crying as creditors carted off the family's furniture and other valuable possessions. She subsequently remarried, not for love, but to have someone to support her two sons. The new husband was very wealthy, but not very nice. She died of cancer a couple of years later, leaving my father and his younger brother to grow up with a stepfather who didn't really want them or like them, much less love them. He promptly disinherited them as soon as he had fulfilled what he regarded as his duty, to put them through college.
My paternal grandmother's sister seems to have had a pretty happy life as far as I've heard. She lived to be 101. She was also not really a full sister, but rather a half-sister -- the family had long suspected, and she confirmed to my father on her deathbed, that her actual father was a man her mother had had an affair with. So apparently these sisters' mother was not satisfied going along with the prescribed "traditional" family arrangement, and I'm very glad she managed to have some fun on the side.
Further back, my maternal great-great-grandmother was the sole financial supporter of the family, running a business of her own with branches in three different towns, after her husband sustained an injury that prevented him from working. I don't think anyone in the family was miserable, but her son and daughter did not have a mother at home much while they were growing up -- not a problem in my book, but not in keeping with the "traditional" family arrangement.
This great-great-grandmother was one of a large group of sisters who'd grown up in Kansas. The eldest married very young to get out of the miserable home, headed by an alcoholic father. Soon after, the mother died, and the younger girls were farmed out to various relatives, with the youngest, an infant, going off to be raised by her eldest sister -- since the father was obviously unfit to raise the children.
And then there were all the "happy" traditional families in the neighborhood where I grew up. My mother still lives there, which has afforded me an opportunity to occasionally touch base with my old playmates, whose homes always seemed happier than mine. Come to find out, quite a few of them were a whole lot worse, including my best friend's, whose mother was a raging alcoholic who would frequently sit the kids down and scream at them from the time they got home from school until their father got home from work and put a stop to it. I saw the father a couple of years ago, which was a couple of years after his wife had died, and was struck by how very happy he seemed -- I'd never seen him like that before. At least my parents stuck to giving each other the silent treatment and leaving me more or less alone.
Were there also really happy "traditional" families in the neighborhood? Sure there were, but there was no correlation between "happy families", and families with only a mother at home, or with a parent and step-parent. And few of the children from happy "traditional" families have grown up to live in "traditional" families themselves -- apparently it wasn't so wonderful that they were determined to replicate it.
Do I imagine everybody was miserable? Of course not. But plenty were, and they often had no way out that didn't entail even more misery. And as I said before, I suspect that most people living in this type of family structure today are relatively happy, but only because people who aren't happy in it get the heck out, and people who know from the start that they wouldn't be happy in it, don't get into it in the first place. Funny how well freedom works.
My gosh your family is depressing. All options existed in those days including divorce.
My mother took her eighth grade education and kicked my dad out and got her divorce in 1955.
My great grandmother got her first divorce around the turn of the century.
If you read real history you will see that there was never a time when American women were weak little victims.
You will see women in the 1800s dumping their husbands and moving on.
You have got to break this chain of passivity, and pessimism in your family.
Divorcées and widows were very common, 2nd and 3rd marriages were common, even watching the history channel will reveal to you how "modern" American life was.
This cloud you live under is self created.
I collect and read old books from the 1800s, they could tell you much .
Marriage is an obsolete institution anyways, created by religions in order to promote procreation and exert control over people.
A great source for information on early American family life is diaries by women and children.
Something that stuck in my mind from a book about women's diaries written on wagon trains was that the men wanted the women to abandon their dresses and wear more practical pants.
The women absolutely refused, telling the men that they would not give up all their womanly rights to the brutal nature of the wilderness, and the practical desires of their husbands.