Bryan Caplan has been arguing that women were freer (from a Libertarian perspective) during the Gilded age. Will Wilkinson and many, many others are fighting that notion. Tyler Cowen's perspective:
I would not in this case take the *legal* oppressions to be a stand-alone or exogenous variable, separable from more general societal attitudes. There were various male desires to oppress women, which took a mix of legal and non-legal forms. Asking how bad the "government-only" restrictions were is an odd division of the problem, since the governmental and non-governmental restrictions were an integrated package which worked together in non-linear fashion.
2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan