People constantly quote that "women didn't have the right to own property", "women were chattel", "women were allowed to be abused, beaten and raped by men", "women didn't have the right to vote", "women were kept out of male-dominated industries", "women were oppressed by men", etc.

All this is bullshit.

Under coverture, single women otherwise known as "femme sole" did have the right to own property, had the right to enter into contracts, and overall had the same rights as single men. It was only when they married that they sacrificed some of their rights to own property and enter into contracts on their own.

When a woman got married she was considered a "femme covert" and her existence was consolidated into that of the man's. People constantly take this to mean that she was chattel, owned by men but this was not the case. Once they were married, women were entitled to be supported and to have the portion that she brought into the marriage managed by their husbands, to the best of their ability. Women had the right to buy necessaries on their husband's credit as their husband's agent. Women could not be prosecuted for most crimes and their husbands would be prosecuted in their stead. Women were immune from liability for debt. They were not in any way chattel, they definitely had less agency, but at the same time they were entitled to protections and privileges and it was considered the man's duty to provide said protections and privileges for them. Women have very frequently sought redress in common law and equity courts when husbands failed in their duties.

Married women were also not allowed to be abused unlike what people think. The laws allowed for mild correction such as spanking the way you would a child at the time but husbands were not allowed to beat their wives black and blue. A woman could obtain a surety of the peace bond to ensure her safety from a violent husband.

https://lonang.com/library/reference/blackstone-commentaries-law-england/bla-115/

https://www.legalgenealogist.com/2019/02/12/the-defense-of-coverture/

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2e88e3f6-b270-4228-b930-9237c00e739f/download_file?file_format=application/pdf&safe_filename=Item.pdf&type_of_work=Journal%20article

Yes, women didn't have the right to vote for most of history, but neither did men. Property owners had the vote, the vast majority of men did not. Male suffrage was something that was fought for, and when men did end up getting the vote before women it wasn't necessarily because of discrimination against women. It was because the vote at the time was seen as a direct extension of men's obligation to be conscripted and fight in war, something which women were not obligated to do.

Something that makes this even more muddy than it already is is that: the reason why votes for women took so long to be implemented was that the majority of women did not want the vote. There were many anti-suffragette societies, and a fair amount of them were led by women.

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1910/jul/11/parliamentary-franchise-women-bill

https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/10/22/450221328/american-women-who-were-anti-suffragettes

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/power/text12/antisuffrageassoc.pdf

Women were allowed to work in a lot of male-dominated industries. Guild-type work was always open to single women and windows. In fact there is a lack of evidence of anything preventing women from working. An article (which I've linked below) says:

"For most girls, becoming a blacksmith was probably not a dream. Husband, family, home: those were the pursuits of a young woman of the eighteenth century. Finding a woman or women working at all outside the home, much less in a male-dominated trade, most likely meant the dream wasn't shaping up the way they'd hoped. Some women worked because they had no choice."

"Though there was no system of standards governing the trades in the colonies, the method of learning a trade generally followed the apprenticeship guidelines established by the guilds in medieval England and Europe. Women were not excluded from membership in any of the earlier guilds. The Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths in London lists sixty-five "brethren" and two "sistren" in its 1434 charter."

The paragraph below is a quote from a redditor "w1g2" who made a really good point regarding work, and women's involvement in it.

Was it a social norm that most women did not seek out careers as they do now? Sure, I don't doubt it. But women did not have access to reliable birth control (because it hadn't been invented) so unless they wanted to spend the entirety of their life chaste, would have to plan for many of their years being filled with pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, etc. Not to mention, quite a lot of the jobs available weren't in nice air- conditioned offices but involved hard labor or danger like becoming a doctor (working with the near dead, sometimes even people with a plague) or a lawyer (working with criminals, especially when prisons did not have as nice standards for living). Maybe it's the case that in different environments, people, including women, will have to react accordingly to different things and maybe it's understandable that in an environment that used to have far more risk and danger and death and with little knowledge or control over fertility, women wanted different things than they do now.

https://www.history.org/foundation/journal/spring04/women.cfm

So. Women were not nearly as "oppressed" as people seem to think they were. There was never a patriarchy holding women down. Were there burdens, obligations and disadvantages? At times, yes. But these usually did not run one way - men too had their own set of burdens. And whenever I mention this to people it's met with handwaving or sometimes outright denial of the evidence.

It seems to be very hard for a lot of people I've seen to believe that women had a lot more privilege and social power than previously believed, and that men had obligations imposed on them.