Rhett was 17 years older than Scarlett?!

Ok its a little incoherent.

That is why feminism was rejected back then.

well, it's a fact of life that men are able to father children longer than women are able to bear them, and i think this is the main reason why older men/younger women marriages have histrocially been more common than the reverse. but even in past times, too great an age disparity could be a source of mockery. there are quite a lot of comic tales from the middle ages about foolish old men who marry young wives and are inevitably cuckolded. The Merchant's tale from the Canterbury tales is probably the best known, but there are others. 'january should not wed may' as Chaucer puts it. however, the age difference between Scarlett and Rhett is not that massive, if she's may, then he is perhaps August rather than january.

It is a tricky issue because it is something we feel so strongly about, yet it is nowhere near a culturally universal value. Virtually every society in human history has defined it somewhat differently.

Of course there must be laws to protect minors from predators, but determining exactly what, and when, whether and how to enforce them is more complicated.

In our own flawed system, a 19 year old who loves a 17 year old is a legally a rapist (yet may or may not be universally condemned by society), but a 79 year old who loves an 18 year old may generally be frowned upon but is fully within legal rights. Of course, consent is always the most important factor, but deciding at what age a person is capable of consent is another foggy issue...and naturally, it varies according to the individual's psyche so laws must always fall short of a perfect model.

To me, 18 is a reasonable age of consent, but as you mentioned, it's 16 in Alaska, as well as in Great Britain, a society with very similar cultural values to the USA. How can one be considered a predator in one nation and a normal, healthy person in love in another? The concept of consent and non-consent should be a moral absolute, yet it is not, and how can it be when even cultures with analogous values define it differently.

I personally wouldn't seek out a relationship with anyone more than 4 or 5 years on either side of my age, and I'm 29, but that's just me.

Of course, in the cultural context of GWTW, a difference of 17 years would hardly have entered the equation. Others have pointed out that older husbands were considered an advantage for girls in their teens. From what I've read, people were still a bit uneasy about too large an age gap (about 28-30 for a man and 18-21 for a woman would have been considered about marriageable age, and no difference at all). I believe people felt 15 or 16 was still quite young, but certainly not out of the ordinary, and there were regional differences. The antebellum gentry did marry off girls very early. I believe Civil War diarist Mary Chestnut was only 13 when her husband started to pursue her. He was eight years older, about the age difference one would expect for the time, and they didn't marry until she was seventeen, reflecting there may have been some uneasiness over too early a marriage (she was, I believe also personally resistant to the idea, considering marriage to be slavery for the woman).

Either way, In terms of media, not much has changed when Hollywood still presents Colin Firth as an appropriate love interest for Emma Stone.

Y'know, it was the same scenario for Ellen's youngest daughter Carreen, whose love-of-her-life, Brent Tarleton was killed in Gettysburg.
However, rather than marry a man she didn't love, Will Benteen, Carreen DID enter the convent in Charleston.
Had Ellen still been alive, I believe she would have been proud of her "baby" for not making the mistake she made.