Re: Is compulsory education fully to blame for

I have no love for compulsory "education", but that's not really the case. Compulsory education was already more or less universal east of the Mississippi half a century before the AOC went up. And it wasn't the idea that women were seen as mostly future wives, because that idea didn't go away until after World War II.

It was mostly a moral panic of "innocent white girls being enslaved" combined with butthurt feminists who realized that young girls were severe competition - girls obviously married young/in their teens, and married older men most of the time, but as with Poe and Clemm, often marriages in the girl's teenaged years began with a courtship (if not consummation) in childhood.

It's telling that even as late as Carroll's day, he most likely expected the Liddell family to let him marry Alice.