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Notes -
This doesn’t affect your broader point very much, but it’s a nitpick that bothers me- ‘concubine’ is not a term for ‘sex slave’. Those did(and still do) exist and are not the same thing. A concubine was a woman who was very similar to a wife, but got a worse deal(usually with stuff like divorce, inheritance, etc). In some societies(such as our own) this was a common-ish form of common law marriage and in others this was a way of regulating the mistresses of wealthy men- these were separate institutions which happen to have the same word in English. But they did have a few similarities- it tended to be acceptable to take a lower status(either enslaved or free) woman as a concubine in a way that wasn’t allowed for a wife, they had far fewer protections from domestic violence or divorce(most premodern societies did have some, even if inadequate), and they didn’t get a formal wedding, but lived in the same household as their husband(this was the term used) who had the obligation to support them, but not at the same level as he would a wife.
This was the ancients regulating cohabitation, and in some cases thé man also had a wife in the same household. It was not some foreign institution that was a case of premodern horror imposed by the patriarchy- we embraced the custom when stepping away from the patriarchy, after all.
One case that’s instructive for thinking about this I’ve found has been ancient German history, going back about 2,500 years.
For the women, marriage and children had almost nothing to do with some right of self-determination. It had everything to do with adhering to the social obligations of their forebears and of their descendants, and it was a massive source of their pride. In no way would they have understood those who extolled the virtues of “personal freedom” in this space above everything else. And they fully knew just as we did that marriage and family life is often a major source of stress and pressure. It contains the highest of highs and also the lowest of lows. You even saw this in the Athenian tragedies like Heracleidae:
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