The basic answer is no. Arabia was not some hellacious pit of jahilliyyah barbarism before Islam. It's worth noting that conditions varied greatly; the culture and life of the settled towns of Yemen would have been markedly different than that of the fully nomadic peoples in the interior which would have been different than semi-nomadic pastoralists or long-distance traders in the Hejaz. Our written sources are also extremely limited. Part of the reason why this image presented in some of the Islamic religious sources has been able to endure is that there's simply more material on it. History isn't necessarily written by the "victors", but it is written by people who can write. Islam arose right around the time that Arabia was becoming a more literate society, and pre-Islamic Arabia was generally illiterate. That being said we do have chronicles, funerary inscriptions, temple inscriptions and so on that present a rather different image than the "barbaric" one.

female infanticide

This comes from the prohibition against the practice in the Quran. The Arabic term is "wa'd al-banat", "the disposal by burying of daughters." http://quran.com/81/8

It's also alluded to in other passages. While these references indicate that the practice certainly occurred, I'm not aware of any particular evidence in regards to how common it was. In the context of the ancient Greco-Roman world, of which Arabia was on the periphery, this kind of infanticide was hardly exclusive to Arabia. Given how widespread these practices were, including in the most "civilized" portions of the world, I'd hesitate to put it under some blanket charge of "barbarism" without contextualizing the practice. And again, relatively brief Quranic mentions are not evidence for this being incredibly common.

There is also limited evidence for ritualistic infanticide. But in regards to human sacrifice generally, as Robert Hoyland notes in Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam:

Human sacrifice was occasionally practised in Arabia, the victims generally being prisoners-of-war, who represented the victory-giving deity’s share in the booty (Mi‘sal 7, 9; Jidhma 2–3),7 though other forms may have existed.8

and:

The third-century AD philosopher Porphyry in his account of human sacrifice notes that ‘the inhabitants of Duma in Arabia used each year to sacrifice a boy whom they buried beneath an altar that they treat as a cult-statue’ (2.56).

senseless violence

It depends on what you mean by senseless. With the exception of Yemen, pre-Islamic Arabia was a stateless society. Tribal raiding was common, and traditional "law", including retributive violence, prevailed in the absence of any other system. However, Hoyland again:

It is the numerous accounts of Arab pillagers in historical sources that have fuelled the arguments of the ‘aggressive bedouin’ lobby. What is wrong with their theories is not that tribes did not practise violence, but that they very seldom did so on a large scale. Raids both among themselves and against sedentaries tended to involve small numbers and to be of the hit and run type: at the first sign of any obstacle or trouble, the perpetrators would simply melt away into the desert.... When large numbers of nomads did infiltrate settled areas, it was usually in response to some ecological disaster, and so they were economic migrants rather than warriors.

and:

A second problem with the ‘nomadic menace’ viewpoint is that it draws too rigid a line between nomads and sedentaries. The pastoral and farming peoples of a given area, whatever their degree of mobility, comprise complementary economic sectors of a single system; they are economically bound together, even if relations between them might often be tense. This is particularly true of enclosed nomadic tribes, which will commonly include a semi-sedentary urban elite who liaise between the townsfolk and the tribesmen. Moreover there is a good deal of fluidity in livelihood patterns in the Middle East. This is because between the fully desert and the fully sown there exist extensive swathes of semi-arid lands (150–300 mm/6–12 inches rainfall per year) which are ecologically fragile and therefore particularly prone to alternating movements in the direction of either greater stationary cultivation or increased migratory herding of animals. These movements are facilitated by the fact that, despite the negative stereotypes in terms of which farmers and herders view each other, they share certain techniques, beliefs and kinship organisation.

women treated like animals

In the sense that there was some day-and-night contrast between pre-Islamic and Islamic Arabia, no.

Hoyland again:

we encounter women first and foremost as wives and mothers. This is not to say there was no differentiation among women. There was, for example, the distinction between freeborn and slave, the latter usually charged with the more menial tasks of cooking (‘the maidservants set to roasting the little foal’, Mu.: Tarafa), bearing messages (‘I sent my slave girl to her’, Mu.: ‘Antara), and the like. Nor should it be thought that pre-Islamic Arabian women did not play a role outside the home....

Moreover in the settled communities of the south Arabians, Nabataeans and Palmyrenes we find women active in a number of different spheres. They commission inscriptions, make offerings to the gods in their own right,7 act as administrative officers (Nami 14, Ja 487), take on a husband’s overlordship upon his decease (CIS 4.95) and construct public buildings and tombs. The last activity points to the enjoyment of a considerable degree of financial independence, and it is also one which gave women a very visible presence in their community, for their faces stare out from many a statue and funerary relief (Pl. 18).

He then discusses women's roles in the spheres of religion and as entertainers, e.g. singers and lute players.

Insofar as women were primarily viewed as wives and mothers, marriage practices varied greatly. Monogamy, polygamy (one man, many wives), and polyandry (one woman, many husbands) are all attributed to in pre-Islamic Arabia.

Insofar as wives were "purchased" through the paying of a bride-price or dowry, this particular practice did not change.

In regards to how Islam changed these relations, well, I think we can see some of the independent power of women in pre-Islamic Arabia in the form of Muhammad's own wife Khadija. Khadija had her own wealth and apparently arranged to approach Muhammad for marriage, rather than the other way around.

As for how Islam may have improved the situation, one way was that it systematized inheritance practices. It also, in theory, established a legal system to which women could appeal, although this was highly variegated and in fact would not develop a legal "infrastructure" until a couple hundred years after the death of Muhammad.

superstition ruling over knowledge

Sedentary peoples are generally disdainful of nomads. So Hoyland quoting the chronicle of a Christian monk named Ahudemmeh:

There were many peoples between the Tigris and Euphrates in the land of Mesopotamia who lived in tents and were barbarous and warlike. Numerous were their superstitions and they were the most ignorant of all the peoples of the earth until the moment when the light of Christ came to them.

Of course, his point here is that the "light of Christ" did come to many of them, as Christianity took hold, particularly in northern Arabia. It's also interesting to point out how a pre-Islamic Christian monk is making the same kind of accusation about pre-Christian Arabs that your Muslim interlocutors are making about pre-Islamic Arabs!

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So in summary, no, that's not really a fair description, particularly in the wider ancient context and not given the evidence that we have.

Source wise: I've quoted it extensively because it is the most concise and comprehensive book on the subject that I'm familiar with but I'd really recommend Hoyland's Arabia and the Arabs.

Quite a lot of the primary and secondary material that he cites would be relevant here as well. After consulting that, I looked into some articles by Mohammed Maraqten that might be of interest, like "Women's inscriptions recently discovered by the AFSM at the Awām temple/Maḥram Bilqīs in Marib, Yemen" in Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies.