What is the price of an upper class identity?

Social classes are a funny thing, aren't they? Even today, we associate certain morals, traits, income, etc. to different social classes. Shaw's Pygmalion is a dissertation on not only language, but the identities we connect language to: gender, social class, monetary gain, etc. Two passages in Pygmalion grabbed my attention. In Act IV, Eliza is upset that the bet is over and Higgins and Pickering have no need for her anymore. What is she to do? She is perceived as upper class (a duchess even), but she doesn't have the money to back it. The only thing a genteel woman, such as herself now, can do is marry. She can't work, because upper class women didn't do that. She is completely dependent on a husband to support her. Her freedom is lost to the refined language she has come to possess. This reminds me of a similar predictment Betty, from Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9, faces. Because she is a lady, she is dependent on her husband. She has no freedom, until the very end of the play when she obtains a job and her own income, which allows her to leave her tyrant husband because she no longer depends on him for money. Eliza makes her own comparison between the independence she had as a flower girl (making her own money) and the freedom she lost when she became a lady. "I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me. I'm not fit to sell anything else. I wish you'd left me where you found me". This is in response to Higgins' suggestion that Eliza marry. Eliza makes the contrast that she is worse off now because she is perceived as a lady and will have to "sell herself" to matrimony, instead of selling flowers. In the next act her father, Alfred Doolittle, has a bone to pick with Higgins' for writing a recommendation for him to an American millionaire, who in turn leaves Doolittle money in his will. "Who asked him to make gentleman of me? I was happy. I was free". This inhertance has bumped Doolittle to the middle class, which, he tells us has brought too much responsibility for other people's happiness and draws upon him to create a new, middle class identity. " I have to live for others and not myself: that's the middle class morality.... I 'll have to learn to speak middle class language from you [Higgins] instead of speaking proper English". Alfred is outraged at being forced into all of the "middle class morality" and makes the same comparison as Eliza: with more money and refined image/language, comes more responsibility and less freedom. It leaves one to wonder which is better: money or freedom? For me personally, I'm right there with Eliza and Doolittle. I would rather have my freedom and happiness than be a slave to money.