We should take care in separating pagan morality from Christian morality- an enterprise the Church has been patiently and prudently undertaking for the last 2000 years. The current pagan mortality, under the auspices of modernism, argued that women were somehow deficient in social standing and they had “scientific” proofs to back this up- irrationality, short term thinking, and a whole other host of afflictions. This belief was nothing new, and the pernicious influence has been felt through history. But this has never been a part of the Christian ethic, and its reinforcement by the Enlightenment never made it more true. [As a quick aside, the very idea of rationality being an essence of being is an Enlightenment invention, as memory was driven out, and conscious became with synonymous with the Kantian ‘seat of critical judgment’…] It should be no surprise that what writers like Hume, Concordant, Schopanhauer and others wrote would not be conducive to dignity and equality that woman deserve.
We should not forget that it was men like Schopanhauer who wrote in “Of Women” (“Über die Weiber”,), that he was in opposition to what he called “Teutonico-Christian stupidity” on female affairs. He claimed that “woman is by nature are meant to obey” and he has wide ranging influence on 19th century thinking from Nietzsche to the feminists to the emerging science of the sexes.
This all flew right in the face of the equality the Church has long sought and equality between men and women written about by Saint Bonaventure. The Church worked long and hard to eliminate fornication (inequal and unjust sexual relations); concubinage, polygamy, bride-purchase and other violations of the justice of God.
As Miss Ansecombe wrote in her essay on contraceptives (an essay all Catholics should read,) "There always used to be a colossal strain in ancient times; between heathen morality and Christian morality, and one of the things pagan converts had to be told about the way they were entering on was that they must abstain from fornication. This peculiarity of the Christian life was taught in a precept issued by the Council of Jerusalem, the very first council of the Christian Church. The prohibition was issued in the same breath as the merely temporary retention of Judaic laws prohibiting the eating of blood - no black pudding! - and the prohibition on eating the flesh of animals that had been sacrificed to idols. And in one way these may have been psychologically the same sort of prohibition to a pagan convert… All the same the prohibition on fornication must have stood out; it must have meant a very serious change of life to many, as it would today. Christian life meant a separation from the standards of that world: you couldn’t be a Baal-worshipper, you couldn’t sacrifice to idols, be a sodomite, practice infanticide, compatibly with the Christian allegiance. That is not to say that Christians were good; we humans are a bad lot and our lives as Christians even if not blackly and grossly wicked are usually very mediocre. But the Catholic Christian badge now again means separation, even for such poor mediocrities, from what the unchristian world in the West approves and professes.
Christianity was at odds with the heathen world, not only about fornication, infanticide and idolatry; but also about marriage. Christians were taught that husband and wife had equal rights in one another’s bodies; a wife is wronged by her husband’s adultery as well as a husband by his wife’s. And Christianity involved non-acceptance of the contemptible role of the female partner in fornication, calling the prostitute to repentance and repudiating respectable concubinage. And finally for Christians divorce was excluded. These differences were the measure, great enough, of the separation between Christianity and the pagan world in these matters. By now, Christian teaching is, of course, known all over the world; and it goes without saying for those in the West that what they call “accepting traditional morals” means counting fornication as wrong - it’s just not a respectable thing. But we ought to be conscious that, like the objection to infanticide, this is a Jewish Christian inheritance. And we should realize that heathen humanity tends to have a different attitude towards both. In Christian teaching a value is set on every human life and on men’s chastity as well as on women’s and this as part of the ordinary calling of a Christian, not just in connexion with the austerity of monks. Faithfulness, by which a man turned only to his spouse, forswearing all other women, was counted as one of the great goods of marriage.
But the quarrel is far greater between Christianity and the present-day heathen, post Christian, morality that has sprung up as a result of contraception. In one word: Christianity taught that men ought to be as chaste as pagans thought honest women ought to be; the contraceptive morality teaches that women need to be as little chaste as pagans thought men need be. "
Further complicating matters is the transformation of traditionally recognized fatherhood roles from the man to the state. This has been an ongoing process for the last 200 years, and the 20 and 21st century feminists have been informed by these changes that came before and are reactionary to the facts on the ground.
So I wouldn’t go so far as to call them nazis but they are beknighted in the same ways that people living under ancient German law allowed for murder in family feuds. Feminists are supporting as much injustice as the old regime, and it is the mission of Christians to combat this with the same prudence and patience by words and deeds that the only true just relation are found in those abiding in Christ.