I've heard that very early Christianity - in its first and second century iterations, before it became more mainstream - featured women in prominent leadership roles and generally gave women a higher "status" in the religion than later versions of Christianity did. I've even heard that members of other religions in the area referred to Christianity as a "women's religion," perhaps as a way of mocking it for the religious power it gave to its female members.
The problem is that I've never really seen good sources on it. There's some analysis on the translation of the Bible that allows for women having higher status, like the argument made here by the Junia Project. There are also some women who are supposed to have leadership positions in the early church based on between-the-lines readings of the Bible, like Mary Magdelene (who was later described as a reformed prostitute, erroneously from my understanding), and more tenuously women like Phoebe and possibly Junia (who may not have been female?) who are described in language similar to other prominent disciples/apostles. I'm not sure how one is supposed to reconcile those examples with Paul's stated advice about the role of women in both homes and churches, however.
Basically, I'm wondering what the going opinions are among scholars about the place of women in early Christianity, and hoping for some scholarly (but reasonably accessible to a non-historian) sources I can look at to help me understand the issue further. I'm also curious to know how it compared to other religions of its day - and then, if there was a change at some point, where and how that came about.
Can anyone speak to this particularly?
So, I think it's important to note that Christianity being "women-friendly" should not be strictly identified with allowing women to be priests/deacons/whatevs. After all, the vast majority of Christians do not become priests and I worry that concentrating so much on the priesthood imports both modern notions about what constitutes "proper" gender roles and a clericalism which is, I don't think, not present during the time period (incidentally I don't think there's any real evidence that the ordination of women was ever widely accepted in the early Church).
Instead, I think it's better to think about this question in terms of how Christianity understood the roles of women compared to the prevailing culture. This is a pretty complicated question, because we're talking about hundreds of years and a large empire and Christian opinion was never exactly uniform (nor, of course, was pagan thought). Thus, I'll be brief. I'd recommend Peter Brown's Body and Society for an excellent overview of Roman attitudes towards sex and gender in this time period, especially as it relates to sexual renunciation. Nicola Denzey's The Bone Gatherers is also a good source, although not a general survey it is written for a more general audience and very interesting (also, if you look closely in the acknowledgments there's an excellent young scholar, who happens to be a very handsome r/askhistorians poster in his spare time, who gets a shout out).
Ok, all that said, Christianity does seem to have appealed very much to women in the time period, for a variety of reasons. Perhaps one of the most important was that it allowed women to break free from the basic duties of the Roman women (i.e. get married, have as many babies as possible, try not to bleed to death during childbirth) by supporting institutions such as consecrated virgins and widows. This allowed women considerably more autonomy than was normal, and women were able to attain positions of considerable import within the Church. For examples, check out the correspondants of Jerome such as Macrina, fabulously wealthy women [allowed to keep their money, since Christianity allowed them to forgo remarriage] who founded monateries and were vital to the creation of the Vulgate. Also, see Ambrose's writings on virginity to see how prized virgins were by Church officials. There's also the character of the Christian mother facilitating her son's conversion, Monica and Helena being the most famous exemplars, which becomes a bit of a trope and is an interesting phenomenon in its own right (and I believe [although am less certain on this point) does not have an easy parallel in non-Christian writings of the time).
I feel like this has become a bit scattered, but I hope I've shed some light. You may also want to check out early Christian hagiography and similar type texts, the sayings of the Desert Mothers, the life of St. Mary of Egypt, and especially the Acts of Paul and Thecla (which should be easy to find online with little effort). Thecla's life was both quite early and enormously popular, it's also a pretty fun read. Hope that helps!
Keep in mind that Paul's letters to Timothy were likely not written by Paul, but rather attributed to him long after he died. Paul's authentic letters are more radical (Galatians 3:28, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus"), the pastoral letters attributed to him are written decades later and are more supportive of the established social hierarchy. There are also later additions to authentic letters that do not appear to be written by Paul and serve the same purpose; by the second century the early Christian church was already pulling back from Paul's egalitarian writings.
Besides the writings in the Bible, we also have a letter from Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan, written in 111-113 CE, indicating that two female slaves were deaconesses in the church.
Generally speaking, women went from an important supporting (not leadership) role in the Church to a subservient one, particularly in the West, by the fifth century.
I have not read it in a while, but the book you want is