I've been sitting on this question for ages to figure out how to answer it. The problem is that the idea of a "degradation" is not quite right. I would say rather that there was a change. I have a couple of older answers that deal with this:

Is the Nuclear Family, with a Stay-at-Home mom, a short lived anomaly in Western history?

It seems that in the early 18th Century, British perceptions of sexual desire shifted from seeing women as the "lustier sex" to instead putting men in that category. What brought about this shift?

A lot of women's work underwent an era of automation over a century ago. What big lessons can we learn from how their lives changed during and after automation that can be applied to the present round of automation?

A gendered division of labor existed for centuries before the time period you're asking about, with most domestic and agricultural tasks assigned one way or another - most households were made up of enough people to allow for that, containing multiple young men and women who were either children of the primary couple or the children of social equals, staying with them to learn skills, (and of course if they had enough money, paid laborers). Broadly speaking, women's tasks were performed inside or were less "violent" - for instance, they would pick up the grain behind the reapers, but they wouldn't typically wield a scythe. As described in the above linked answers, what happened over the course of the 18th century is that an ideology developed around this situation. Rather than this just being the way things were, it became divinely ordained that women were more suited to domestic and/or delicate tasks, and that this was a glorious purpose. For most women, this made little difference to their situations; in some cases, it was arguably an improvement, since the work and restrictions they would have been expected to live with in previous generations were now something with a certain amount of cultural value. It's a relatively small number of elite women whose lives ended up curtailed by the new ideology - women born in the 1790s, who might have been highly active political hostesses or intellectuals if they'd been born in the 1740s, but were instead pressured to focus solely on their children. To my knowledge, no, these women did not make the historical changes a rhetorical point in the fight for women's rights; it's only more recently that people have discussed it.