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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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