I watched it and really enjoyed it, but was still extremely sad and concerned that religion has such powerful sway over women in every aspect of their lives. Their bodies, their children, their freedom.
I read an interview with the author of the book the series is based on. She said that when she went to college in New York and talked about her experiences her peers talked about her escaping from the patriarchy, and her response was, "Where were all the men in this patriarchy? It was mostly the women in my community who were oppressing me."
I thought that was interesting because yes, on the one hand, a lot of the rules clearly seem to have patriarchal roots. The way that so much importance is placed on bearing as many children as possible is a complicated issue. I think in their community, it's not so much about wanting to keep their women barefoot and pregnant for the sake of it, but more about wanting to replace the Jewish population killed in the Holocaust. But of course that necessarily means that women have to have lots of babies and so they are encouraged to marry young and have large families, and discouraged or forbidden from doing things which might interfere with that community goal.
There are other cultural aspects which - to my uneducated eye - do seem to be grounded in misogyny and don't really seem to have any logical justification. The idea that women aren't allowed to play music seems terrible to me. And the strict segregation of the sexes is so sad. The wedding scene where all the men were on one side of the curtain with their dancing and music, and all the women were on the other side just seemed so sad and unnecessary to me. And if young men and women aren't allowed to socialise and get to know each other before they get married, to me that seems like a recipe for lots of disastrous unhappy marriages. But then perhaps if you live in that community then your life revolves around your children and other women, and you might not really see your husband as anything other than the man who shares your bed at certain times of the month and otherwise does his own thing. Perhaps that's not so sad when everyone in your community is in the same kind of marriage. I can see how someone might find that normal, compared to someone in a non-religious culture who sees her husband as a stranger she shares a bed with and is envious of the other people she knows who are in healthy, loving marriages.
I thought the bed sharing rules were very peculiar. If the couple aren't allowed to share a bed until a week after the woman has stopped bleeding, then some women are going to miss their fertile window every single cycle. Seems rather counterproductive if your aim is to have as many babies as possible.