freedom and equality
What is freedom, really? There are a wide range of definitions, but one common theme many of them share is an understanding that freedoms are created by means of imposing some restrictions. It's a balancing act; having laws gives us security which gives us freedom, even though it means losing out on some supposed potential freedom to perform acts that break those laws.
Equality is similar. Equality before the law? Equality of opportunity? Equality of outcome? The former is reasonable, but the latter is not, as it separates action from consequence. Regardless, equality is mostly a pipe dream; biology alone is sufficient to ensure this, and society follows suit in countless ways despite continually growing efforts to resist.
It's not just the core family that matters for raising children in a society - it takes a village.
And yet we've allowed this village, an evolved result of a feedback cycle of memetics and genetics over thousands of years, to dissipate. The "community" has lost its core; people don't know each other; children are left with caregivers their parents barely know; and parents are hesitant to even speak to a child that isn't theirs.
I'm not a religious man, but we threw out the baby with the bathwater when we purged faith from the West, and the result is a fractured community. Meanwhile, foreigners with intact cultures can move in, set up their institutions, and reap the obvious benefits of having a supportive, aligned community.
If you have a daughter, do you really want her to have fewer choices in life than your son?
She'll have more choices and less choices. She'll never be as strong as he is, will never be as spatially or mathematically oriented, except in rare cases. She'll be more socially aware, more empathetic, better at communicating. She'll be capable of having a baby.
Do I think she should have "fewer choices"? Perhaps, but doubtless not in the way you meant it. I'd like her to marry a strong, loving provider with the intention of staying together for life; I'd like her to have children, and to put them first in her life. I think the result will be upstanding grandchildren who will repeat the cycle. I think this adds as much to civilization as any individual is generally capable of.
I don't think she should have to be a homemaker, but on the other hand, I don't want her to spend her twenties as a slut only to marry some beta male in her 30s. That model is proving itself broken, with ample evidence you can read on any number of forums.
You'd prefer she "know her place" for the sake of a speculative theory about her freedom being a cause for the decline of the society?
Generally, one puts quotation marks around things that someone else said; I didn't say that at all. Don't strawman me. It's not a matter of knowing one's place so much as it is realizing where one stands in relation to a much larger timescale than one's own life. Consider the sacrifices that lead to your birth and raising; consider those you'd make for your own kids; consider those you'd want them to make for theirs and so onward. There's actually an incredible burden you are shouldering as the recipient beneficiary of all of those sacrifices, and it puts an onus upon you to carry your share of the load.
The alternative really is extinction, if done on a wide enough scale, for any people, culture, or nation that manages to collectively forget this.