I am not an expert on the current debate on totalitarianism or Sparta but I can give you a clear answer that no, Sparta was not totalitarian. I feel confident saying that despite my lack of expertise because totalitarian is confined to describe governments of the last 100 years.
There are a few reasons for this. We have a lot of words to describe single leader government systems from tyranny to autocracy to despotism. The rise of a mass media and explosion in communication, along with the need of the fascist/soviet mass parties to control these new outlets led to "Totalitarian" being used because thinkers of the time thought that these governments needed a name to separate them from the older more familiar forms of government. If you go to the Wikipedia page you can find these 6 conditions for a totalitarian country as well as a LOT of writers on the topic
Now this isn't at all to say Sparta might not fit some qualities of what we think of when the word totalitarian comes up. However as my former professor (a leader in the field of North Korean foreign policy study) told a student about his paper titled Totalitarian Aspects of Chinese Legalism, "You make good points but the title may as well be gibberish."
The ancient sources in fact often suggest quite the opposite. Plato and Aristotle both describe a fairly egalitarian society (in some respects). Other ancient historians believed that all Spartan citizens had an equal share of Spartan land. Moreover there were various institutions that have almost democratic aspects at Sparta, like the [assembly] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apella) and the [council of ephors] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerousia). Though there were [Spartan Kings] (http://www.legendsandchronicles.com/ancient-civilizations/ancient-sparta/kings-of-sparta/), there were always two, so as to not have one Spartan overly powerful. However, more recent scholarship has looked to these ancient sources and questioned their validity. It is suspected that these ancient institutions were actually much more recent 'invented tradition'. Flower has an extremely interesting chapter in Powell's 'Sparta: Beyond the Mirage' called 'The invention of tradition in Classical and Hellenistic Sparta'. Essentially Flower suggests that the idea that Sparta was an egalitarian utopia was created by 3rd century BC kings ([Agis] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agis_IV) and [Cleomenes] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleomenes_III)) inventing ancient traditions to legitimise the changes they wished to make to the Spartan system. However, in reality no sources written prior to these kings explicitly tell us that Sparta was notably egalitarian or totalitarian, it is only later sources like Pausanius and Plutarch that suggest this egalitarianism, assuming that the traditions at Sparta in their day, were the same as those of the earlier Classical and even Archaic periods. So, it is generally accepted that Sparta was not 'totalitarian' (not even an ancient equivalent of 'totalitarian') but the current trend in scholarship is to question how ancient their apparently egalitarian institutions really were, and to refute the idea that the system described in 2nd or 3rd century BC sources can be transposed back to earlier times seamlessly.
Didn't women have it slightly better in Sparta than elsewhere in Greece? Well, free women, at least. I read somewhere, don't remember where, that they had more property rights (in the event of all the males being dead) and that they weren't married off until the advanced age of 18 (which had the benefit of making them more likely to survive childbirth).