Oversimplified yes, but just in a way that I am pointing out the situations that would have led to those decisions were the same that tended to cause the same social structures over and over. Obviously there are those amazing (and amazingly rare!) moments in the story of our species where some individual had enough stick on the fulcrum to say "okay, let's try it THIS way instead" and change things up.
The role of patriarchy held in place by social and religious needs and kept in check by high birthrates, still necessary to keep the populations going under constant threats from pandemics and food shortages. But it is no mistake that by the very earliest dawning of the industrial age with water-wheel mills, and Newcomen engines, those questions of equality were already being asked, and even attempted to be applied here and there in lopsided fashion.
In the Early days of the American Revolution, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams, delegate to Continental Congress:
That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the
Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex.
Future president John Adams' reply to her is fascinating and telling:
But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented. — This is rather too coarse a Compliment but you are so saucy, I wont blot it out.
Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems. Altho they are in full Force, you know they are little more than Theory. We dare not exert our Power in its full Latitude.
