Well, they probably didn’t know what they were doing. Pitching and striking tents was a staple in my unit. We set up GP Medium and GP Large tents by the dozens every summer and the women had no problems doing it with men or by themselves.
That’s odd, that you and I witnessed the same thing so differently.
The women we watched were part of a field MI unit that we worked for, and the tent was their own field tent.
We old timers that had mostly never seen women in the field, watched in fascination as their lack of upper body strength frustrated their efforts, we were laughing at the hilarious scene, and eventually men drifted over to assist them.
My guess is that what you saw in a mixed unit, is the natural, (almost) unconscious division of labor that takes place when males and females are mixed in work, you see it even in restaurants and civilian jobs, when a particularly heavy load comes in and the male employees naturally drift out to handle it while the females do something else. In total war that doesn’t work, the built in weaknesses of your armies, will be exposed, and capitalized on.
Big armies are going to be dropping Paratroops and special forces on our rear guard military, suddenly the ability to grab a 50 and take it somewhere, and quickly build improvised fortifications and carry out wounded and change a truck tire, will become important, unfortunately a large portion of our divided labor will be dead and every ounce of man power suddenly, desperately, important, that will be a bad time to learn about the importance of muscles in warfare.