What's interesting to me about this moment is the fact that people forget that for this young person, not sure what pronouns to use, can see their own struggle in something that happened to Warren. While it's not the same, there's a lot of similar aspects in how Warren's mother treated her that young people from a lot of walks of life can get. It's also interesting that Warren openly admits in her book about her own family issues (can you call it abuse?) namely with her mother.
Regarding the whole thing with her mom and her, Marrying well was a big thing for some families. Given her backstory about her family (like the fact that they basically were practically living paycheck to paycheck and had their car taken back, it doesn't at all surprise me that her mother wanted her to marry someone who had a better social status and money so that her daughter would be secured a future financially. Given the fact that her first husband, Jim, met her in High school and is the father of her two kids, they clearly knew each other well enough to try to make a marriage work. I'm guessing that Jim probably came from a more well off family seeing as he was able to land a job at IBM during the 1960s.
During the time period of her first marriage, you rarely saw a woman go to college after they had married or had a kid, not that it didn't happen, but a lot of women dropped out of school to stay at home for their kids. But for a woman to go back to college and get a law degree after having two kids, during the time that she did it is still impressive and probably caused a lot of contention with her mother who clearly wanted her daughter to be more of a Social Mother wife than a working mother.
So I can understand why she would see a lot of herself in Raelyn given that the Raelyn is probably struggling with the same rejection that she did when she had to tell her, more than likely, religious, mother that she was getting a divorce. It would be like now a days saying to your parents that you're going to, I don't know...move some where dangerous. It was something that wasn't done, and was looked upon as a sin and that it would bring down her, and her family's, status. Also pointing out she's from OK. So yeah, religious and social expectations were, and still are, high over there, so her dropping her husband could be seen as a scandal to her family.