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It was also good for women too. Women were second class citizens until the 1960s. This isn't even a debatable. And it was worse the further back you went.
It's entirely debatable to anyone with the slightest knowledge of historical fact. The anti-suffragettes were likewise women, and they argued vociferously against having the franchise extended to women as a class. One of their tactics to try to prevent it from happening was to demand that any plebiscite on the matter be voted on only by women, since if the question was limited to women only, both the suffragettes and anti-suffragettes expected the plebiscite to fail. And in fact, it was passed by having both men and women vote on it together, as the Suffragettes had demanded.
Feminists demanded that men have an equal say on whether women should get the vote, because it was unpopular enough among women that it couldn't win without the men's help.
This history, of course, has been buried down a mineshaft ever since, because of course the March of Progress has been an unquestioned benefit for all involved and its aims always succeed. If one is willing to tell unlimited lies about the past, the present is always the best of times, and the future is always sunny.
That too is quite debatable. Sure, marital rape was only recently criminalized, from which we infer that prior eras were a horror show of unrestrained sexual violence against women. In a similar fashion, we've only recently begun systematically searching schoolchildren for weapons when they enter school grounds, which has at last addressed the rampant and unrestrained schoolchild murder spree that stretches back to the endemic child-murderers of ancient Rome.
But at least in our own era, we've solved intimate-partner violence, right? ...Right?
What evidence specifically has led you to the above conclusion? Primary sources? Court records? Diaries of women in the 17th century? Historical writings conveying attitudes toward women? Is there something solid your view is based on, or is it just a story you were told?
In the just West? From Roman's views on women, to the Bible, to what Enlightenment philosophers wrote about women, to laws in the US and Europe, etc. Or just go back and read what women wrote about their life in the past, how they were portrayed in films and television, whatever. It all paints a pretty obvious picture. What evidence specifically has led you to the your conclusion that the opposite is true?
Women are at least half of Christianity, and considerably more in America. I assure you that they too have read Romans in particular, and the Bible generally. The large majority of the women who take Christianity seriously, who are in fact likewise half of their respective population, do not seem to find anything objectionable in either. You thinking they ought to find these passages objectionable observably does not compel them to object, probably because of a number of other verses which you appear to be ignoring, which speak at length of husbands and wives, men and women treating each other with love and respect.
My wife's sister attends a church that's gone quite Progressive. My wife and her mother don't like attending that church because they are moving to include women in leadership roles, something my sister-in-law is leary of, and my wife and mother-in-law consider flatly unacceptable. You are of course free to assemble a stepford-wife caricature of all three women in your mind, but the reality is that they have views on the proper interaction of men and women very different from the liberal consensus, and that they arrived at these views quite consciously, value them deeply, and intend firmly to keep them. It seems to me that the standard Progressive response of smearing such women as brainwashed is itself straight-up misogynistic. Despite endless propaganda to the contrary, Womanhood is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of Progressivism Inc.
I certainly am not in the business of defending Enlightenment philosophers, but perhaps you could be specific?
I have, a bit. Generally I find descriptions of a life of joys and sorrows, hopes and worries, different in some ways than my own, but similar in many others.
At this point, you're up to the beginning of the last century, well into the progressive era and something like a generation past the point that feminism has started shaping the culture on a grand scale. And yet, how were they portrayed specifically? My wife watches a lot of TV, and being generally conservative, she watches a fair amount of old TV. Women are generally portrayed as kind, thoughtful, empathetic and generally decent. One of my favorite movies is from 1950, and features a prominent female lead; I see no reasonable objection to her portrayal. One of my wife's all-time favorite movies is The Taming of the Shrew, a movie so dangerously based that it made me more than a little uncomfortable the first time we watched it together while dating. She sees nothing objectionable in that movie's portrayal of its female cast, and on reflection neither do I.
Early TV and movies were not shy about marketing themselves to women. Which do you think is likelier: that they pursued at least half their audience by insulting them, or that you don't have the best understanding of people who lived in a world very different from yours?
Reading historical letters of husbands to wives, of women to other women an men to other men on the occasions I've come across them. Historical accounts of how men and women have lived together, what their concerns were, and how they addressed them. Observing the lives of old people I know, some of whom have been very old indeed. Observing my parents' own marriage first-hand. A number of historical anecdotes about the oppression of women that I've confirmed to my satisfaction to be false. Watching old movies, listening to old music, reading old fiction, and noting the themes therein. The observation that humans don't change that much, and the observation that our current society lies about this fact with wild abandon to cover its own failures. Complaints of contemporary women unsatisfied with the "progress" our current society has gifted them. Reading some small amount about the anti-suffragettes, who they were and what they argued for. A lifetime of observing the intellectual bankruptcy of popular feminist arguments, and the general forms that bankruptcy take, especially the way they argue by assertion and then use their purported moral authority to shout down any counter-argument. A lifetime of conversations with my mother, sister, female friends, and six years of conversations with my wife, her sister and her mother.
That, and the observation that people making arguments like yours don't actually make an argument and provide evidence to back it, but simply act like your correctness should be self-evident. We're a couple comments down in the chain, and the most specific evidence you've cited is "the book of Romans".
I ask again. What specific evidence leads you to the conclusion that women in the past lived as second-class citizens, or otherwise suffered unusual oppression relative to men?
Are people who can't own property and vote second class citizens to those that can or are they equal? To me, if you don't have the same rights as other citizens, then you are a second class citizen. There weren't many powerful institutions in the West going back to the Roman Senate, to the Anglican Church (until very recently), all the way up to the Catholic Church now where women had equal rights to men. This isn't even debatable to me and I don't how anyone could say otherwise. Whether or not that is a good thing and whether or not some women preferred that is irrelevant.. If you have less rights than others, you are a second class citizen (in my opinion). Obviously women weren't the only people this happened to.
In terms of sociopolitical power, or just in legal power? I tend to agree with the progressives that equalization of sociopolitical power is what equalization of legal power was designed to do, and their definition of "equality" is along the sociopolitical axis. They usually call this kind of equality "equity" because it's explicitly not legal equality.
If the intersection of your immutable characteristics grant you more sociopolitical power than others, others are second-class citizens compared to you. Progressivism is correct in that this is a thing that happens; the fact that progressives aren't actually interested in progressivism is as much an indictment of the underlying message as shitty Christians are to Christianity.
The reason stratifying classes of citizen is bad, of course, is because of moral hazard (which leads to "separate but equal but the accommodations for one group aren't as nice or available as for the other group"). This doesn't necessarily need to split across race or gender lines- geographic segregation is generally enough- but it often does.
The best example of this breaking across gender lines is the draft/conscription, of course- women, with their choice of politicians, can vote the country into a war they'll never have to die on the front lines of. Not that they don't have other ways of exercising this power even when they don't have the right to vote, of course, but the entire point is that if social pressure is enough to get men to go kill themselves for the ultimate benefit of women, why should they be permitted to double-dip with the vote too?
Sure, the modern female-supremacist refrain is "well, women are just as able as men are to die on the front lines", except every war ever has revealed this to be a lie; battle lines in Ukraine are male-only because at a population level only men are physically powerful enough to get the job done outside of very specialized roles, and because biology (men can't currently reproduce unaided) dictates a limit to how fast your post-war society rebuilds.
At the end of the day, of course, (liberals and progressives tend to forget that) you can't eat equality or equity, so if "you can't get labor from men without marriage and you're useless for gathering those vital primary resources on your own", which is the state of nature of women, then you're going to be paying a nearly unlimited price for that labor (i.e. you'll be property sold by father to husband) and that's just the way it is.
Yes- currently, modern men have to learn to deal with the fact that in the face of the machine they're even more inherently worthless than women are, and overcoming a 200K+ year head start in the "has inherent value" department is no small feat. (Which is... partially why women fear that the current situation is a local minimum for the political power of men, I suspect.)
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