As with many questions on this sub, this one comes loaded with a few preconceptions that need to be dispelled.

This is such a massive topic that I’ll have to limit myself to Western Europe and the US when I use examples. You can pick any region of the world over any period and find complex histories of women and gender so we might as well just focus on the region that I assume most of us are familiar with.

When did women start experiencing equality issues?

Implicit in that question is that there was a time when they didn’t experience equality issues, which isn’t true. They might have experienced different inequality issues, but that women and men are not the same has been a historical belief for as long as we’re aware of. Women being excluded from ruling except in the total absence of a viable male heir is an obvious example of this. There were no sovereign classical Roman empresses nor Roman generals. We have no surviving female writers, historians, or poets from the classical era. When women do turn up in the historical record for these periods, they’re usually not treated well. Agrippina, wife of Claudius and mother of Nero, is one of the most well-recorded women of antiquity, and she’s despised by our main source Tacitus, writing in the 1st-2nd century AD. Here’s a nice little extract on her:

From that moment [their marriage] the country was transformed. Complete obedience was accorded to a woman - and not a woman like Messalina who toyed with national affairs to satisfy her appetites. This was a rigorous, almost masculine despotism.” (1)

This sort of invective is common in a lot of classical and late-antique sources. See the 2nd century BC historian Polybius on Queen Teuta of Illyria:

“Teuta… listened to them in the most arrogant and overbearing manner… Giving way to her temper like a woman and heedless of the consequences… she was so enraged at the speech that, defying the laws of nations… she sent emissaries to assassinate the one who had been so bold of speech.” (2)

Or perhaps 6th-century AD Procopius on the Empress Theodora:

“Her mind was firmly and perpetually fixed upon inhumanity… she herself with stubborn self-will fulfilled her own purposes with all the powers at her disposal, and nobody dared to ask mercy for anyone who had incurred her displeasure… And though she had strayed thus into every path of self-indulgence she thought fit to run the whole of the Roman Empire!” (3)

As you can see, the tone of these sources is less than favourable. Not only are these powerful women treated with suspicion, they’re attacked with a lot of the same accusations. They’re deceitful, power-hungry, underhanded, emotional, and so on - there’s a clear negative stereotype that many classical writers approached women with. They were treated with suspicion because being in power wasn’t where women were supposed to be. That sexist mindset is something that, one can argue, still persists in some places today and never faded.

Women were powerful, lead armies, led countries and won battles

A very, very small number of women would. Elizabeth I is not representative of 99.9% of women in history. Just as we can’t say that all men were powerful because Henry VIII led armies, we can’t make broad assumptions about entire social groups based purely on those sitting at the top of the social pyramid.

Let’s run with the example of the English monarchy. Since William the Conqueror in 1066, there have been 41 monarchs, only 7 of whom have been women: Mary Tudor, Lady Jane Grey, Elizabeth I, Mary II, Anne, Victoria, and Elizabeth II. Even among these, Lady Jane Grey ruled for a few days and Mary II was co-regent with William III. Comparatively, there are considerably fewer female monarchs that male, as is true for pretty much any ruling position throughout history. Women didn’t suddenly stop ruling one day, they rarely ruled to begin with, and in monarchical positons have continued to rule here and there as time goes on.

So where does this impression of a powerful female past come from? Simple: what women do we know of in the past? Do we talk of the millions upon millions of peasant women in the streets and villages, or do we only hear about those few women that find their ways into positions of power? Now this is true for men of course and the vast majority of men were dirt poor and struggling, but men had more opportunities for power and influence than women. Think of how many male generals, writers, artists, rulers, politicians, or scientists you know. It’s probably a lot. Now how many women? Definitely fewer. Women have to work a lot harder to find themselves in the historical record. That has the dual effect of a) leaving women out of traditional history, and b) only letting us see the women that make it to these exceptional positions. It can lead to false impressions on both ends of the scale: that women didn’t do anything in history, or on your end, that they used to be able to do everything.

Women segregation?

I don’t think segregation is the proper term. You’re probably looking for the idea of separate spheres - the idea that men work and confront the world, while women are the ones to stay home and manage the domestic sphere. As with a lot of historical models, this is being rejected by a lot of modern historians.

Separate spheres was an ideal, not a reality. It might have been true for the wealthiest people in society that could afford to do so, and these are the people always best attested to in our sources, but the average family wasn’t structured like this. The 19th century folktale of ‘The Merchant’s Wife’ is a good exemplification of this. In the tale, her husband’s store falls on hard times and the wife is forced to help run the shop, something that ‘proper’ women weren’t supposed to do, but in doing so she ends up saving the store. (4) The moral was that old saying: ‘you gotta do what you gotta do.’ Poor families couldn’t afford not to have women or children help work their crops or manage their stores more often than not. If you check the sources I’ll link below, there’ll be a book called Family Fortunes that treats this topic in-depth, so if you’re really interested then it’s worth reading.

When did women stop being leaders

We’ve addressed this earlier but I’ll expand on it from another angle here.

Leaders can be a relative term. Queens and Prime Ministers are one type of leader, but what about smaller-scale things? Is the leader of a women’s church group or literary circle not a leader of some kind? To bring it down to a level we’d consider powerless, let’s go to slaves in the American South. There’s an interesting issue of inequality here with what work male and female slaves had to do. Men typically had the more physical field jobs, while women had the more domestic jobs. You can read into that division as you please, but for our purposes it’s worth noticing that this tended to divide working slaves along gender lines. What we find in the now separate female groups are leaders. People in the community that are respected and act as a focal point. Midwives and the elderly were two common ones, acting as leaders to their group even though they were all slaves. (5) This an extreme example but I wanted to highlight that leaders can be relative. Women still wielded power within their communities, even if they didn’t sit in office or on a throne.

start losing their rights? (Voting, etc)

They couldn’t vote until the women’s suffrage movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The vote first came to women in the US in 1919-20 with the 19th Amendment, and to British women in 1918. It was not a case of it being revoked at any point before then, it was just never offered in the first place. Voting in general is a complicated subject since the vast majority of men couldn’t vote until quite late either due to property requirements.

In my opinion, underlying a lot of the issues with perceptions of women in the past is the issue of where scholarship on women has been focused. There’s been a growing consciousness of the overly modern-focus of women’s history. For example, at the 2005 Berkshire conference on Women’s History, 86% of the papers presented focused on the post-1800 world. (6) The issue with this is that we end up with a mass of literature on the recovered agency of women in the modern age, while the under-explored pre-modern world remains shrouded in darkness and stereotypes that swing heavily towards either the ‘golden age’ as this question seems to, or to a pre-feminist dark age that is equally untrue.

To summarise, there was no moment where women suddenly started experiencing inequality. There appears to have always been some perceived divide between men and women. There were powerful women but they were, like powerful men, not reflective of the majority of women. Women still organised among themselves though and lead within their own communities and families. As for gender separation, we need to separate the ideal from reality. The social expectation that women shouldn’t work always yields to the need for a family to eat.