Poor argument. Women were chattle during the age of chivalry. Chivalry itself became highly romanticized over the depictions of chivalry amongst the aristocracy, but the common women of the time saw little of it.
Women were not chattel during the age of chivalry. That's just Gloria Steinem-type feminist propaganda. It's been repeated so often over the past forty years that people now believe it.
You may be correct that non-artistocratic women of the time saw little of the chivalry common to the higher classes, but that's because their men weren't exactly in a position to offer it. Those men were poor and had to spend all day plowing the fields, fighting in wars, and doing other unpleasant tasks.
We never think about that, of course, and the reason we don't think about it is because men generally care more about women as a group than vice-versa. There's probably a biological reason for that: Because women give birth, an individual woman's life is more important than an individual man's life. Because of that, both men and women tend to think in terms of women's interests. In a political sense, men don't have any unique interests that are contrary to those of women.
This is why "women's issues" become very important when women have the vote, while no one even conceives of the idea that men have any particular gender-based interests, let alone panders to them. Go to any big ticket college in America and you'll find no shortage of feminist professors howling that women were "chattel" and whining that women have been historically expected to do most of the housework, child rearing, and cooking. But try as you might you won't find men whining that for the past several thousand years they had to go off to fight wars (while women didn't), or had to plow fields (while women didn't), or had to lug massive stones up the sides of pyramids (while women didn't), etcetera.
Men simply take their obligations in stride. We'd laugh at a group of men who began demanding that the government take their unique gender interests seriously, but women are praised for making precisely such demands. Not every woman behaves that way, but enough do that it skews politics sharply leftward when they get the vote.
Think of it this way: Women on average live a few years longer than men. That's one of those little factoids we all are aware of, and men simply accept it. I'm perfectly happy if the ladies live longer than I do. But imagine if the reverse were true and men lived, let's say, five years and eight months longer on average than women. We'd never hear the end of it. The term "life expectancy gap" would be emblazoned into our political lexicon as surely as terms like "wage gap" and "gender gap". Congress would be spending gadzillions of dollars on research to try to close the gap. Every little problem that bothers women more than men would be blamed for the gap. Feminists and Democrat politicians would walk around wearing buttons with the phrase "five years, eight months" printed on them to constantly remind everyone in the universe of this horror that afflicts women.
This all stems from the fact that men desire to protect women and children, while women desire to protect themselves and children. That's a natural and good thing, but it becomes distorted when the state replaces men as the natural provider and protector for women (and children). And, while the final results are admittedly still outstanding, it looks as if giving women the vote results in women making an unending series of demands on the state that will ultimately lead to totalitarianism.
Men have obligations that women simply do not and should not have. It's our obligation to defend the country during wartime, for example. Giving women the vote is a problematic issue because it diverts attention from our obligations, which are necessary for society's long term survival, toward goodies that are beneficial to women in the short term. This is why countries such as Sweden, which are obsessed with political equality between the sexes, become passive nanny states unable to even think about defending themselves. Wars are yucky and ugly and violent, and they kill women and children sometimes. So they're dangerous and we should stop fighting them and spend the defense budget instead on....you guessed it.... women and children. That's the rationale that begins to form. And over time men start shirking their responsibilities to women and children. After all, women and children are being taken care of by the state, so what good are women to them anymore, other than as sexual playthings? The concept of family begins to die.