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How many men do you know that would answer differently? I realise this is one of your weaker assertions regarding gender differences (with the stronger one being "It is not possible for them that something contemporary can be worse than something present in the past"), but to my eyes answering earnestly with anything other than "now" is a mark of edginess: you must either be so dramatic that you refuse to let yourself consider the less-glamorous parts of your value function, or so psychologically deviant from the grillpilled median that you genuinely would trade off arguable spiritual benefits of past societies for all our material advances in technology, medicine, peace et cetera. Ironically, the only people over the age of 18 I know irl who would answer differently from "now" are women in my family: my mother who would return to the Soviet Union per the "dramatic" exception, and her mother who would choose some point in time before 1900 for being a religious extremist.
If you have come to be known as the "actually arguing to retvrn to the past" guy in your social circles, consider that your arguments about more detailed pros and cons of past societies might no longer actually be received on their own merits either. People might not be willing to entertain an "isn't it curious how quickly they could build a bridge or train station in the late 1800s compared to now?" in the spirit of intellectual inquiry if the expectation is that it will be used as ammo for "...and therefore we should restore the hereditary monarchy", and if you are a woman in $current_year, pointing out that the hereditary monarchy entailed wrongs against your gender that are nowadays treated as blasphemous is as convenient a way to shut down the discussion as any. In other words, your problem may not actually be that women are politically qualitatively different, but rather that you haven't found a social circle that agrees with your politics, and it is merely a downstream annoyance that women have a particularly quick and easy way to weaponise the disagreement.
Notice that these discussions were not serious intellectual inquiries about the past, they were more of light topics when you shot out random questions. And men almost always answered with any epoch that you can think of. Obviously anyone put always first the "but the medicine", but that was logical and assured from the beginning, I still have not met someone that likes to die because of the lacks of antibiotics.
This is a weird assumption from your side: I am not the "retvrn guy" neither in my circles nor personally speaking, and my social circle is radically diverse in terms of ideologies and nationalities. And again, it happens also when I met people that do not know me well or very well.
It wasn't clear to me from your original post that you are talking about lightweight low-stakes conversation rather than an attempt to seriously think about questions (even if they may have a whimsical dimension); however, if you are, then I'm all the less sure that anything you observe is indicative of any sort of deeper qualitative difference. It really shouldn't be a surprise that, at the level of "you have 2 seconds to come up with an answer, otherwise the silence will be awkward and your social status will drop", what will come out is our society's cached thoughts, and that our society's cached beliefs include every past era having been terrible for women. Speaking for myself, if you asked me over a drink about my favourite daydream timetravel mental LARP, I might talk your ears off with semi-elaborate plans for how I would go from stranded in the Ancient Roman countryside to having the ear of someone with whom I could bring the timeline of history forward by a bit (I like to imagine I would have gotten along with Varro); but if you instead asked me what era I would suggest my girlfriend to have a timetravel adventure in, I would respond in exactly the same way as the women you are quoting, for exactly the same reasons.
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