Hi Grateful-Nikki, I hope you don't mind if I try to make yesterday's answer a little more full, not complete because there's just too much involved for a few small posts on a forum.
Before getting back to the model of what's going on in 1 Cor. 11 and 14 which I believe representative of the text, I'd like to say a few words about 1 Timothy 2, another highly disputed passage in sexual egalitarianism context (meaning there are many arguments addressed elsewhere on the matter which I cannot raise or refute of support here).
A major basis for Paul's arguing that women in the church (church assembly is the evident context) are to "learn in all submissiveness" and are prohibited from teaching or exercising authority over a man (vv. 11 and 12) is (1) that "Adam was formed first, and then Eve" and (2) "Adam was not deceived, but the woman [Eve] was deceived, and became a transgressor" (vv. 13, 14, cf. Genesis 3).
In other words again, Adam and Eve to Paul, as to the author of Genesis and as to Jesus, form a paradigm for their descendants, the human race. Adam is leader because he was created first, before Eve, meaning that in marriages, the husband is leader of his wife. And this carries over into the church. And Eve and wives are not to teach or exercise authority over their husbands in church setting also because Eve herself was the one deceived by the serpent (not that all women were deceived). Churches are comprised largely of families and families are primarily centered in the husband-wife pair (Paul is also aware of and concerned for widowhood, singleness, and other assorted conditions wrt family, e.g. 1 Cor. 7). A metaphor for the church is the family.
And the pattern of female subordination is supported elsewhere not only by Paul ("wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord," Eph. 5 in a hierarchy pattern that includes also child submission to parents and slaves to masters, cf. also Col. 3) but Peter (1 Peter 3) and probably assumed as you hint in Jewish context of the day. Leaders of the church are called elders (ignore deacons for the moment) and are assumed to be male ("the husband of one wife," 1 Tim. 3, Titus 1), who are qualified to be elders in part only if they manage their own households well.
Of course the nature of male leadership in the marital pair is to be chiefly love for one's wife ("as Christ loves the church and gave Himself up for her," Eph. 5:25), while elders, to whom the flock of God is obliged to submit, function as those who keep watch over souls in the church because they must give an account of spiritual health of the church before God (Heb. 13:17), for elders are to be "not domineering over those in [their] charge, but being examples to the flock," cf. 1 Peter 5:3.
Meanwhile and otherwise, Christian ethics apply to all Christians in all stations of life (bearing the fruits of the Spirit, growing in grace, self-denial and cross-bearing, and so on). Husbands and wives are to be for God and for each other. Elders and church flock are to be for God and for each other as if Adam and Eve had never sinned--or at least that is the ideal all Christians are obliged to strive for daily.
So in 1 Cor. 11 also, when a woman prays or prophecies in church assembly, she is to do so only with a symbol of her husband's or father's authority on her head, for (as many would argue), "her [long] hair is given to her for a covering" (v. 15). What then does Paul mean not many paragraphs later when he writes, "As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says" (1 Co. 14:33-34)?
At this point (well, as in others before), there are a number of questions that pull for digression which I will here ignore. And there are various proposals as to what is going on. Generally it is accepted that for a woman to pray or prophecy in church assembly, she is not being silent, but speaking. What I think is going on, and what I think stands up to close scrutiny barring other evidence to the contrary (though not without challengers) is that the silence here enjoined on women in church assembly concerns the events of prophecy evaluation ("Let others weigh what is said," v. 29), with avoidance of shame in public (v. 35) as one motivation under assumption of husband and father leadership.
Prophetic utterances in 1 Cor. 14 context were not to be accepted by the church without corporate evaluation. The evaluation would lead to an official position by the church. In this official corporate evaluation, women were to submit to men and remain silent. Imagine the shame of a woman (Paul's perspective) who argues openly in church assembly with her husband over the significance of some prophecy just delivered. And again, imagine a class of urban Greeks in a sub-culture that is pretentious, competitive, and proud.
Or at least the above represents my attempts to understand what the New Testament says on these issues, particularly regarding the silence of women in 1 Cor. 14:33-34. There are many challenges to such readings, notably from sexual egalitarian theologians who disagree with demands for female submission in marriage and/or church, and of course much scholarship that supports the views I represent above while refuting alternatives.
Nor do the views of what the NT says which I here endorse condone abuse of authority or forbid wives and the subordinate from "obeying God rather than man" (cf. Acts 5:29) where there is a conflict between what God demands and what human authority demands. Nor does the above deny many ministry roles to women in the church.
A larger issue, as I think you raise, is how for example the contextually limited situation represented in 1 Corinthians 14 can be taken as normative for the church at large, particularly in our own churches nowadays. One popular way is to say in effect or overtly that the apostolic record as a whole does not oblige the church in anything, but remains merely one stream of tradition among many. But as I think I have implied above, especially in my first post on this thread, one cannot deny apostolic authority of the NT Scriptures without in consequence denying the authority of Jesus who called, taught, and commissioned the apostles.
And then if one accepts 1 Corinthians 14 as part of the normative record for all churches of Jesus, difficult and now divisive attendant issues also arise such as the present roles of prophecy, tongues, and the nature of Christian epistemology (Google that one). But they say not even Rome was built in a day.
