When I was young, the eldest of my great aunts came over from Ireland to stay with my mum and I for a while. The ROI had legalised divorce a few years prior and, at the age of 75, she wanted to divorce her husband. I was too young to understand much of it at the time but we remained close as I was growing up and I wrote about her life for a class history project when I was in secondary.
She'd lived her entire life in a tiny farming village (think farms, church, 1 shop, 2 pubs) in a dirt poor region of Ireland. She, her husband, and most of the people they knew eked a subsistence living out of poor soil and, pretty much without exception, all lead pretty tough lives. After working on her family's plot as a child, she married at 19, and worked with her new husband and his family on their farm, which was badly mismanaged by said husband. When she first suggested that they try different crops, her husband beat her around the head with a poker straight from the fire. She still had remnants of burn scars on the side of her face at 75.
Between the ages of 20 and 38, she had 10 children (7 lived to adulthood), along with 2 stillborns and several miscarriages. Each time, she continued working- herding livestock, tilling soil, lugging firewood and grain buckets of water uphill- until she was actually in labour and was usually back at work a week afterwards with a baby strapped to her.
She saw absolutely none of the little profit they managed to make - if there was ever any money, it went straight down the pub with her husband and his brothers. In later years, when it was clear that they were consistently failing to make a profit, she was allowed a little more say in how the farm was run- and finally managed to turn profits- and still saw none of the money. She got up in the morning before everyone else, started making breakfast for the household, fed the animals, fed the men of the house, washed and dressed the youngest children and gave them all breakfast, cleaned everything necessary, then started whatever work was needed on the farm, prepared lunch for the household, continued working on the farm. At some point, her husband would decide his work was done for the day and he - along with most men in the village - trooped off down the pub. My great aunt, along with other women, kept working usually until it was dark, then made dinner for their children, cleaned a house that was filthy from muddy boots tramping in and out all day, looked after however many children there were at that point, and then waited to see what sort of mood her husband would be in when he came home.
That was her life, with very little variety, for years. Things likely got easier as the children grew up, and in the 70s there was an injection of development funding into Gaeltacht regions from the EU, which would hopefully have helped a little, but life was never very good. She told me mum that she decided to leave after her brother in law - who'd been especially brutal towards his wife that eventually she barely spoke- died, and the men of the family - who knew the gist of how he'd been - only had good things to say about him. No one cared about the misery he made of his wife's entire life, and she knew the same would likely happen with her own husband and didn't think she could bear to see it. That, combined with the loss of her already shaky faith, made he leave in the end.
This is the halcyon days of a world without any recognition of a woman's individual rights or wants. Her life was hard, but not unusual. It was shared by almost every woman she lived alongside in her village, and in their predecessors. There are many women around the world today for which this is still a reality, but there are many who have been afforded so much more, and I think it's both ignorant and insulting to claim that feminism and the expansion of women's rights has somehow been a net evil.