Many people in the 1890s US thought the same thing.
This might seem like a linear form of progressiveness, based on the last half century, but it isn't. Just ebbs and flows.
Typically what's occurred is a period of uncertainty allows for strict and religious sects to be emboldened and revive compliance with their ideals as they offer an ephemeral form of certainty, dominant Abrahamic religions include very gendered roles and control. (Other belief system's populations die out due to lack of breeders, so it is just survivorship bias.)
I think a lot of it boils down to poverty and literacy. Religious fundamentalism is largely a pastime of the poor, and as the US has become more affluent religious fervor has faded.
> Other belief system's populations die out due to lack of breeders, so it is just survivorship bias.
Breeding isn't a sure-fire way to produce more believers, either, and I say this a a non-religious person who was raised in a very religious family, married to another non-religious person who was raised in a very religious family.
There are many correlations for the last half century to try to latch onto, but there is a historical reality that continues to this day: they will outbreed you.
What happened in the 1890s was not unlike today's era - Corporations just got "personhood". Railroad tycoons entrench hold on US commerce. Southern states push for undoing reconstruction-era reforms. Chinese exclusion act is enacted to drive Chinese laborers (who were instrumental to the national railroad buildout) out of the US.
I'm sure there are tons of parallels. The national party constituencies were reversed (Southern whites favored Democrats vs. Northern elites favoring Republicans).
The populist party almost won! I wonder if its loss made everyone disillusioned about breaking the two-party system, and the individual person's re-affiliating with one of the other parties are what "switched" what the Democrat and Republican parties represented.
Sex and gender issues in the modern era move only in one direction when looked at over longer periods of time. Progress isn't strictly linear, but that doesn't mean we should assume it swings wildly back and forth. It doesn't.
This might seem like a linear form of progressiveness, based on the last half century, but it isn't. Just ebbs and flows.
Typically what's occurred is a period of uncertainty allows for strict and religious sects to be emboldened and revive compliance with their ideals as they offer an ephemeral form of certainty, dominant Abrahamic religions include very gendered roles and control. (Other belief system's populations die out due to lack of breeders, so it is just survivorship bias.)