Arioch,
The fact is even though that through modern western history, there was a tendency for men over women to be in certain positions, there has been no conspiracy to diminish the importance of women. There have been many important women leaders, from Elizabeth to Catherine to Isabella. They were recognized as great leaders by men at the time, and for centuries, without interruption, and without regard to their gender. Most historically important artists and scientists have been men, and one could say that its because they were educated differently, and this was true--women were discouraged and prevented from doing some things. However nobody was preventing women from doing simple things such as writing poetry. In fact one of the poets regarded with greatest acknowledgement during Western history, continuing uninterrupted has been Sappho. Women born in Christian Europe didn't find as much success--but I don't think this necessarily have to be attributed to either the idea that women are not as good, that women were given less opportunities, or that history has obscured women of great importance. There have been woman artists that have been rediscovered, like Artemisia Gentileschi and Judith Leyster, but anyone who argues that they were as good or as important as say Raphael or Caravaggio I think doesn't have a good understanding, and I think if they really rose to pre-eminence they would have been recognized. But I also don't think that this reflects a history of repression of women, though obviously women were given different environments and opportunities. Because, they could have done the same things as these male artists did, if they wanted. Overall, it just means that women had different roles in the society, which led them to have different focuses. Western society may have been patriarchical in one way, in some sort of social bias, but it was not exclusively and absolutely patriarchical, or else we wouldn't have seen any women leaders at all. There was no ..'conspiracy' to put women down.
Remember, that liberal education was held important for women also in the West, from the Renaissance to the 19th century. Even courtesans in the Renaissance were highly educated and composed poetry. Women were held from doing the highest form of art generally, because it involved painting nudes, which violated women's modesty. Women were not actors in Shakespeare's plays either, because acting was considered immodest. Finance and empirical science was considered brute. In some way, in the way there was social bias, women were put on a pedestal in which they were elevated above the brutisms of men. If you went to a woman in the 17th century and said she was being repressed by a patriarchy she would laugh. This started to change as the role of women started to change in society, as society became industrialized and urban centers developed. Women did have positions of power and influence though.
Women were considered less rational by intellectuals in the Enlightenment. In the 19th century, under the influence of Romanticism they were believed to be the standard bearers of morality and intuition. (here intuition became an attack on reason). The main thread in Western history is the belief that women were different than men, something that has been challenged in modern life to allow political equality to women. Surely we want political equality, and we don't want to pigeonhole any gender, but there is a question to whether the old beliefs were completely wrong. Postmodern feminists, rejecting the old formulation that masculinity is active and femininity passive, have nonetheless adopted the idea that femininity is transgressive---which says the same thing but with a positive spin which places women above men.
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