Sir Walter Consent In The 1950's

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Yet, without Sir Walter’s consent, Anne could not have married Captain Wentworth at nineteen due to the Marriage Act of 1753 that increased the marriage age to twenty-one without parental consent in order to deter secret and unequal marriages (Moore, 2009, p. 9). This law made it much more difficult for upper class men to marry women below their social status and for women to use marriage to move beyond their own class as well as handing the control over their children’s marriage back to the parents. Within the novel, ‘Sir Walter laments: that war and the infusion of wealth that war has brought have served as the “means of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction [p. 15]”’ (Lynch, 2004, p. xviii). However, Sir Walter’s position