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Autors: Eleanor Mills, The Sunday Times

Until pretty recently, a woman’s face was her fortune. A girl’s best life plan was to trade her virgin body for the biggest house and best lifestyle possible. Indeed, the further out of her social league her eventual husband, the more she was to be congratulated. Not for nothing has the hooking of the rolling-in-it Mr Darcy by the impoverished Miss Elizabeth Bennet been such a favourite for centuries.

Well, it’s time for some new narratives. Recent studies and research — including one reported in this newspaper last week — show that more women are now marrying men on the same social level as themselves (it’s called assortative mating and means, for instance, that women graduates marry male graduates). And, for the first time, more women are marrying chaps from further down the social scale than are marrying up.

This news has been almost universally greeted as a disaster; even the left-of-centre Institute for Public Policy Research, which published one of the studies, bemoaned the loss of social mobility that “Mad Men marriages” (where women marry the boss) had given to society. But surely that misses the point.

What these studies show is that as women become better educated and more financially independent they are able to make different kinds of marital choices. Rather than make the age-old bargain of swapping a hot young body for a fat gaff, educated women who make their own money can instead buy their own house and install in it whatever kind of chap turns them on. Ladies who wear the financial trousers can marry for love, not a meal ticket — which is why we are seeing more management consultants marrying comedians, media executives marrying jugglers, and bankers marrying plumbers.

There may, of course, be many out there who come out in hives at the thought of such a scenario, but that doesn’t stop it being increasingly common. A fascinating book just published in America called The Richer Sex by Liza Mundy argues that “the big flip” — where women earn more than men — is imminent with wide-ranging consequences for relations between the sexes.

“Today, wives in dual-earner families contribute, on average, 47% of family earnings. In 2009 nearly 38% of employed wives outearned their husbands,” she writes. Her thesis is that the next generation of women will earn more.

This is not just an American phenomenon; all over the world, women are gaining the majority of university degrees, have high levels of ambition and, with higher levels of education correlating closely to future earning power, could well out-earn men. It is a phenomenon we are all going to have to get our heads round.

Mundy paints an intriguing picture of women’s economic potential and its knock-on effects for relationships, not all of it rosy.

Several studies show that when wives earn more than husbands, divorce rates rise, but often this is because such women finally have the resources to leave — “It’s so much easier to dump him as I’m not dependent financially,” as one of the case studies put it.

From a female perspective, this is progress; how many women in history have stuck it out in loveless marriages for financial reasons? Cultural background is also often the crucial factor in such unions not working out; in macho or traditional societies, where much store is placed on the man earning the money, a female-earner scenario is bound to be more difficult.

More heartening are the descriptions of their own lives by breadwinner wife/supportive husband couples who paint a picture of partnerships where both excel in different areas, and husbands enjoy the lack of financial pressure, spending time with the children and even competitive baking.

“There’s a lot to be said for having a supportive husband,” one colleague who has recently married down confided in me the other day, extolling the virtues of coming home to supper, a hug and a glass of wine rather than an empty flat. “Successful men have known the joys of this arrangement for years; why shouldn’t women?”

Conversely, another friend who is married to a super-alpha high-flyer (he is rarely off a plane) moaned about how her own career had been derailed by the demands of his job, which always trumped hers. “I would urge any ambitious young woman to find a spouse who will happily support her and keep the domestic front functional,” she warns. “Being married to an alpha male is death to a female career.”

It is hard to imagine, for example, how the BBC Breakfast presenter Susanna Reid would cope with her mega-commute from London to Salford, for instance, without her husband to manage their three children. Super-successful men often have wives who are domestic chief executives — high-flying women are now doing the same.

All of this is a work in progress. As a society we are ambivalent about female breadwinners. Many of the ones I know often keep quiet about their situation or try to camouflage their superior financial status. Some overcompensate, being a rather surrendered wife at home to protect male egos, scared their superior firepower in a fight could destroy the compromises of their relationships.

One of the optimistic lessons of Mundy’s book, however, is that female breadwinners should stop fretting and instead congratulate themselves for being at the crest of an ever-building wave of female success. What is frontier territory for big-earning wives at the moment is going to become ever more common. Rather than feeling flayed by society’s ambivalence about them, they need to walk tall and light the way for the younger women following behind.

This is the first time in history that women have been able to control their biology enough to get educated and choose their own lives and mates from a position of power. The Richer Sex chronicles how achievement and money are increasingly aphrodisiac qualities for men and that marriage rates for high-earning females are on the rise (while those of low-earning females are falling). Rather than being intimidated by high-status mates, men are increasingly attracted to wives who offer an alternative to lives as wage slaves.

Talk of marrying down or up no longer reflects the changed world around us. We all need to be more imaginative, tolerant and optimistic about what new relationships between the sexes might look like rather than viewing them through an outdated lens. We are only halfway through the sexual revolution — there is far more to come.