A lot of people are not very versed in their history, so that, when they look around and see that men and women seem to have the same sorts of opportunities, be they educational or employment wise, are allowed to vote, purchase homes or cars, and travel wherever and whenever that they so desire, subject or limited only to the money that they have access to, it does seem like a pretty fair and equal world. However, that is the way things are on paper, even in the best of civilizations, and certainly was not the norm, one hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, but it is the norm, for many countries in the western hemisphere as well as it being the norm for various other nations across this world.
Still, sad to say, there are many other nations in which a patriarchal system of governance is still the norm, whether that is in conjunction with religious authorities, or strictly state sanctioned, but in either event, in many areas of the world, women are restricted in their opportunity to be educated, in their freedom of movement, in their dress, in their employment opportunities, in their rights, and in their marriage, and the more restrictive that these conditions are, the less flexibility that these women have to develop their own minds, or to seek valued economic opportunities, or to become sovereign within their own selves.
In an era in which the world has become fundamentally smaller, it is both problematic as well as futile to believe that with the exception of some very small and isolated enclaves, that people even in the most restricted nations, will not be somewhat cognizant of what others are doing and the freedoms that these people are able to avail themselves of in these other countries; and that thereby to then believe that half of the population that is being denied fair and equal access to some of humanity's most fundamental rights such as self-determination, education, and achievement, would not somehow be resentful of such a denial, and further, that nation-states that treat half of the population as being entitled legally to nothing more than being treated as the property of the male species, would be a nation-state that would find its progress, be it economic, intellectual, or just about anything of merit, to be handicapped by its lack of diversity as well as its closed-mindedness.
Such fundamentalism, whether created out of good intentions or not, has little or no room, to be justified in the present age, for laws and doctrines, even of the highest order, are susceptible to wrong interpretation and wrong implementation, of which, those that are most fundamentalist in their structure, no matter how diligent and resolute that they may individually be, will find, that the dead weight of so many people upon their shoulders, as well as the constant and unrelenting opposition by the vibrant and lively underground of those that do not support such oppression will undercut them at every conceivable avenue, so that their very narrow-mindedness will of its own accord, preclude them from seeing what is just out of their sight but is gaining upon them, which is that true justice will have the final say.