"They" figured out long ago that if you control women, you control men. As Adam Weishaupt put it:

There is no way of influencing men so powerfully as by means of the women.  These should therefore be our chief study; we should insinuate ourselves into their good opinion, give them hints of emancipation from the tyranny of public opinion, and of standing up for themselves; it will be an immense relief to their enslaved minds to be freed from any one bond of restraint, and it will fire them the more, and cause them to work for us with zeal, without knowing that they do so, for they will only be indulging their own desire of personal admiration.

Long after, George Orwell operationalized the same principle in 1984:

It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.