Aren't they? How do you rise in a society where your lot in life is determined by your family?
And no, I don't have a full life. Never denied that. Of course there are choices you can make and ones you can't, that's true of everybody. But it doesn't mean you just accept the things you don't have a choice in. If your husband wasn't a good man, would you just have accepted it and let him beat you? That's fucked up. And obviously you don't believe that everybody should sit down and deal or the Magna Carta wouldn't even have been a thing. If you don't believe you have any effect on the world, what's the point of even being human?
Not in the same way that politics or academia or technology does. It's not an insult: There are a lot of people brighter than me. The work the biologists do requires a lot more brains than the work I do. Gender has nothing to do with it. My intellect is inferior to theirs.
There aren't betrothal contracts here: People chose their spouses, as adults. Which is mostly done on the basis of attraction.
But I guess I can see that, sure. You can have sex with ugly women as well as pretty ones, so either way you're getting laid, pick the one that will do more work for you. Economically, it makes sense.