People who haven't studied history extensively really do not understand how awful it was for women, minorities, and the disenfranchised just a hundred years ago. Women were not allowed to have bank accounts in their own name without their husband's or father's explicit permission until the 1970s. The first countries to give women voting rights were in the 1920s, but Switzerland didn't give women the right to vote until the 1970s. Up until the mid-20th century adult women in Western countries were treated like children in that whole areas of learning were forbidden to them so that their all-important "innocence" and "moral purity" could be "maintained". It was expected until after WWI for anything that women read to be heavily bowdlerized so that they didn't come across anything "immoral" or "imprudent". A man would control what his wife was allowed to read, and it was typical that a scholarly man would forbid his wife reading his own books that he wrote—just one example being Sir Richard Burton, who published an unabridged translation of The Arabian Nights, and made his wife promise to never read his edition because of the sexual content in it. And, contrary to what women nowadays like to think, most women back then were in fact fine with being policed like this, because it was part of the social fabric of their day. Women took pride in their purity and self-policed to a high degree in order to maintain their perceived moral purity.

And you get so many women nowadays who engage with history on a shallow level, who gravitate toward historical eras because of the aesthetics, who don't understand or refuse to understand how awful it was to actually live in those eras. So many gravitate toward the Regency era, for example, because of Jane Austen, and the pretty, diaphanous dresses of the time, but because they only read Romances set in the era, which are fundamentally fantasies, they don't understand how awful it actually was back then. In the early 19th century your average woman aged 40 was less educated than your average boy of twelve, and married women had no legal right to their own children. Rich daughters were only educated in the arts, like letter-writing, music, and needlework, and poor daughters were not educated at all. The only practical education women received was in learning how to read, and that was only guaranteed if you were upper-class. While still unmarried you were entirely legally and socially dependent on your father and brothers, and once married you were entirely legally and financially dependent on your husband, and ceased to be a legally independent personage entirely. You were utterly at the mercy of your husband, who controlled your finances, your children, what you ate, and could legally beat you with any stick thinner than his thumb, and nine-tenths of men back then were monsters.

And of course medievalists love to talk about how these extreme conditions were the product of the Renaissance and didn't exist in the Middle Ages, and how women being oppressed wasn't as much of a thing because of all the responsibilities they wielded back then, but that's only half-true, because in the middle ages women did have lots of responsibilities, but their rights were still severely restricted compared to men's. In the middle ages the only people who had rights or privileges as we think of them nowadays were the landed class, the nobles, and in most medieval societies noblewomen were subordinate to noble men. The men had say over their households except when they were absent, and where Salic Law prevailed women were barred from inheriting the property of their parents, a significant restriction for the only class that held property at all. Women reined over the private sphere and men the public sphere, and while there were politically powerful women they were only of the most powerful families in Europe, and were deliberately going against what was socially expected of them. A woman from a minor noble house had little power and was indeed controlled by her husband. And commoners had no property and few rights at all, and women were still socially inferior to men. So, contrary to what medievalists like to claim, women of all classes were indeed disenfranchised compared to their male counterparts, and had fewer rights and privileges in whatever way counted for their socioeconomic bracket.

In short, up until very recently, women have, for all of history in every culture, been severely controlled by men and have had very few rights, and the people of today do not understand how dire it was for them for most of history. And this ignorance is very dangerous, when a significant percentage of our ruling class wants to take us back to that. And the fake historians, the historical fangirls/fanboys who claim "Not MY time period! Women actually had it good in MY time period!" are doing the devil's fucking work and actively contributing to the rampant historical illiteracy of today's society. Fuck them.