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 .
Actually I collect and read a lot of old books too. And also more recent historical studies of the 19th and early 20th century U.S. Certainly it wasn't just a sea of miserable marriages. But there were plenty of people for whom the overwhelming social and legal pressure to get married and stay that way "til death do us part" left them stuck in misery -- either unmarried or married. More ordinarily, people just didn't expect anything out of marriage except some economic and physical security, which probably a solid majority of them got. People want more from life now, and I think that's a good thing.