here's the thing, though, that CONSTANTLY drives me up the wall
the reason why Victorians Thought The Way They Did about Sex and A Woman's Place has its roots in economics, specifically, the effect the Industrial Revolution had on women's economic labor, and as such WAS A PRODUCT OF ITS PLACE AND TIME and cannot be extrapolated backwards, or sideways onto other cultures
prior to the Industrial Revolution, there were, essentially, two functioning economies (caveat that everything I'm going to say applies to Europe and European-descended cultures and I in no way am meaning these to be universal statements): the male economy and the female economy. Men's economic work was primarily conducted outside the home and was more often exchanged for currency; women's economic work was primarily conducted inside the home and was more often exchanged for goods and services, but it was nevertheless economic work that was, most of the time, absolutely vital to the survival of the household (for a good example of the early modern American female economic world, see: A Midwife's Tale, the Life of Martha Ballard, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich)
it was also, in large part, based on things like textile production that were very quickly mechanized during the Industrial Revolution. thereby removing women from participation in the economy (at least if you were rich enough to stay out of the factories).
with minimal economic activity left, there needed to be a new role for (wealthier) women, and the Victorian ideal of "the moral center of the home" was born. add that to what has been referred to as the "desperate insecurity of empire" and you have a new era of sexual repression that really, really did not exist before
women's independence has always been tied to women's economic power, that is, the relative value of "women's work" in society (for another example, see the discussion of Egyptian women's independence related to their Greek counterparts in the Classical era as related to the relative value of textile production between the two societies, in Women's Work: the First 2,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber)
so any depiction of "historically accurate" misogyny has to first answer the question of a) what part of history; b) what economic activity are women engaged in; c) has there been mechanization of textile production yet?; d) no?; e) then stop giving them fucking Victorian values for fuck's sake
specifically on the Medieval example, way back in undergrad I was involved in a book project where contributors wrote about a "powerful medieval woman" of their choice, and someone chose that one Eastern European woman who killed a lot of people and then got walled up in her own castle, and I remain furious about that because why is that an example of a "powerful medieval woman" where there is evidence for literally THOUSANDS of landed women who ran their estates while their husbands were off at war, or continued running their estates after their husband was dead in war, or ran their estates because their brother fucked off to the priesthood, or were gifted estates by the crown on account of being good at running estates, or were an abbess and ran the abbey's land in their own name, or literally any other reason why a wealthy woman would have power in a landed society
the thing is that the nobility of medieval Europe had two jobs: war, and land management. the men spent a LOT of time doing the first. who do you think was doing the second?
the best thing a medieval noble or gentleman could do was marry a woman with a practical disposition and a good head for numbers. someone had to make sure no one starved during the winter while the men were off sticking each other with sharp things.
See: Life in a Medieval Gentry Household: Alice de Bryene of Acton Hall, by ffiona von Westhoven
