[MENTION=141306]sweep_shot[/MENTION]
My parents grew up in the 1940s and 1950s which you idealise. My mother was in England and my father was in East Pakistan.
Let me say a few things about this.
Firstly, life was in many respects similar in terms of the place and rights of women at the time. Both had patriarchal systems in place, and both used religion as a flimsy pretext to enforce what males in that society had wanted since pre-religious times.
Secondly, it was far from idyllic. The plight of women in both societies was very similar - and terrible compared with what we see in western societies now.
The myth of "happy families" was a blatant lie. Women were married off young on the basis that it was the "right" way to be sexually active - and ended up married to self-centred, oafish males.
But there was no economic freedom for women, so they were trapped in terrible marriages to appalling men, with no way out.
Marital rape was universal. Violent "disciplining" of children was universal.
Women were expected to have one sexual partner in their lives, yet their actual sexual health was terrible compared within western societies today. Deaths from cervical cancer were as terrible as they remain in 2022 within the current immigrant Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. Cervical cancer is caused by sexual transmission of the Human Papilloma Virus - yet married Muslim women remain at high risk of death from it, and western women never die of it because they are vaccinated!
Levels of female tertiary education were low - you put that down to them not "needing" an education, but without education there is no economic independence, and without economic independence women were trapped in bad marriages to useless misogynistic husbands.
As I keep writing, people become sexually active at the same age whether they are married couples in Afghanistan or single people in Europe. But without universal free healthcare, western women in the 1940s were often trapped into premature parenthood which ruined their lives.
Premature parenthood was a tragedy for married 20 year old women who ended up stuck with their useless husband forever. It was a catastrophe for single 22 year old women, whose chance of marriage in the future basically vanished, and they ended up having to marry the father if he would have them, regardless of his level of uselessness.
In short, religion has often become a tool used by unscrupulous males to establish and maintain control over women.
Religion served a purpose in primitive societies which lacked better mechanisms for protecting its population. The misogyny of most established religions at least ensured that babies were not born to impoverished unwed mothers and that men had to take responsibility for their children.
But western societies have learned that what religion used to provide societies, badly, can be much better provided by having a population which is universally educated, has universal free healthcare, and has equal rights to employment enshrined in law.
Those mechanisms protect women and children far more effectively than religion used to.
As I have shown, in the 1940s there wasn't a vast difference between life for the middle and upper classes in the UK and Pakistan. The old patriarchal society prevailed in both.
But fast forward to 2022, and the child of an unwed mother in the west gets better education, better healthcare and a better life than the child of married parents in patriarchal societies.
In effect, this thread boils down to whether religion or social progressiveness delivers better outcomes in life.
But the answer is actually that social progressiveness outperforms religion by a massive margin.
Which is why even previously conservative, religious societies like the Republic of Ireland and Italy have abandoned religion in favour of progress.
: they rule Amazon deliveries there
