I go back to the Acts 15 story wherein, as I understand it, the author is rewriting history a bit to portray a united church at an early stage where in fact there was not yet an orthodoxy. The issues that were most disturbing to the Pharisee Christians in Jerusalem were ostensibly "Pauline" ideas about foods sacrificed to idols and eating blood as food as well as the Christian freedom from concerns about mere corporeal matters like porneia. After reading a dozen proposed recreations of the original Pauline position, I have concluded the evidence confirms redaction and interpolation throughout, but exactly what Paul himself thought (he may have adjusted his own views) will never be certain. The role of women, compromising for the sake of others, matters of sex and eating sacrificed meat are especially found in contradictory arguments, often right next to each other.
Myself, I have come recently to suspect Paul himself was conservative and probably a hardnose. Some collections of writings were gathered into longer epistles by those who had followed his leadership. Very soon after the 'book' was produced an influential more Gnostic voice seems to have basically diffused Paul's conservatism through the addition of a few lines here and there. The Gnostic branches of Christianity were responsible for the letters' preservation. This is the form of the work that circulated more widely. Then about a 70 years later the Patristic redactions occurred, probably at the same time possibly the same hand as the Pastoral epistles. This was possibly after the book of Acts was written. These interpolations have Paul sound more concerned with image and accommodation to expected societal norms, some of which appears in Acts as well.
This leads back my comment about Acts 15. It seems the author was countering a then present form of Pauline Christianity, one shaped by the early interpolations, one that saw Christian freedom as liberating not legislative. Women seen as equals in the sight of God. Acts also shows no awareness of the Pastorals and the timeline they suppose.