How About "Access to Property, Wealth, and Personal Agency?"

The director of a delightful dramatization of Sense and Sensibility at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Hana S. Sharif, understands the Jane Austen novel as women

navigating a world that denied them access to property, wealth, and personal agency.

That got me to thinking.

First of all, contra feminist agitprop, the key to Sense and Sensibility is not the patriarchal hegemony of evil patriarchal patriarchs working out its evil will on helpless innocent young women but that the two men seeking the hands of our young Dashwood daughters, Elinor and Marianne, are denied access to property, wealth, and personal agency by widowed elderly women. No unsuitable marriages for them! 

So the matriarchy did it! The grande dames (or rich old biddies), Mrs Ferrars and Mrs Smith, are determined to disinherit the young men if they marry the propertyless Dashwood sisters. And the powerful older women are careful to make sure that the young men, Ferrars and Willoughby, do not have professions that might give them some independence from their parental moneybags.

A moment's thought tells us that it must be so in an agricultural hierarchy where the social position of an upper-class family depends on its rents from its rich acres. Everything depends on the prudent management of those riches from one generation to the next. And upper-class women were just  as invested in making strategic marriages as the upper-class men. In fact, according to Gergory Clark in A Farewell to Alms, the agricultural society of Britain was a society of downward mobility, in which second sons (and daughters) descended the social hierarchy from upper class to middle class, and kicked the middle class downward into the lower class. You can see that this is a high-stakes world.

Notice too that the feminist narrative about the patriarchy is really only interested in the upper class. What was life like for the middle class of the towns in the agricultural era? Who knows? But we can guess that the further down the social scale you go, the more life becomes a desperate struggle to stay alive at any cost, hierarchy and patriarchy be damned.

Let us think instead about our own age, and the access to property, wealth, and personal agency afforded to young men and young women.

First of all, in our age we infantilize young people by confining them in government schools and government-ruled universities in which they have very little agency, particularly since all educational institutions are now liberal and ne'er is heard a discouraging word against the liberal ruling class. As for property and wealth, the liberal ruling class has instituted a vast program of debt slavery by encouraging young people to get into debt while obtaining higher education; this seriously hampers their ability to acquire property and wealth and exercise personal agency.

Notice that the way that young people are selected for selective colleges is by toadying to the ruling class party line in their college applications. where is the  access to property, wealth, and personal agency in that?

Also, the characteristic job today is a subordinate position in a vast corporate bureaucracy or hierarchy where young people are taught to be obedient and good team players. Where is the personal agency in that?

And this is not just for deplorables and helpless minorities but well-born scions of the ruling class. They must all get with the program or suffer the consequences, just as it was with Edward Ferrars and John Willoughby back in 1811. Then and  now, if the ruling-class scions get with the program then they are rewarded as their parents and their connections shower them with ruling-class benefits. But woe-betide the rebel.

Are there any rebels in the liberal ruling class? Inquiring minds want to know.