We are used to viewing history through a singular lens, as though everything was always worse all the time forever about everything in the past, but that isn’t at all true. ( @Aria I think this is your cue.)
There are places and times where women enjoyed more rights than they do now in many cultures, including our own. With many original themes, they make changes to remove many of the abrasions and inequities of history around race, gender and sexuality because so many players deal with that enough in their day to day. There are still plenty of things to play about, plenty of reasons for characters to engage in conflict, without those pieces. It would be a mistake to assume that all historical settings engage in those aspects, just as it is a mistake to assume that all of history if a monolith of ‘bad’ and ‘worse’.