They also faced dismissal and sometimes full-blown ostracism for their non-aristocratic roots. In response, these new wives began to remodel the homes they now inhabited-and often faced snide judgment for doing so. “The stately homes of England were all too often dark, dingy, and terribly cold.” But “after marriage, they found themselves chatelaines of houses where taking a bath involved a housemaid making five trips from the kitchen in the basement, carrying jugs of hot water to fill a hip bath,” author Daisy Goodwin writes in Newsweek. Most American heiresses had grown up with modern conveniences. And many of the women who went to England to seek love exchanged their home ties and their comfort for their new titles. If the marriages sound like cold, hard contractual negotiations, they were. Many of the heiresses of the up-and-coming Gilded Age magnates were daughters of self-made men who didn’t have the social standing of longtime members of high society, and they had trouble gaining acceptance among well-heeled New Yorkers who shunned what they saw as “new money.” A title was seen as a shortcut to social acceptance, and plenty of British aristocrats were willing to trade their titles for cash. Meanwhile, American socialites coveted what they saw as the social status of members of the British aristocracy and royalty. When the Military Expelled LGBTQ Soldiers With 'Blue Discharges'