and men who kidnap children and put them in reform schools and go around shooting children and all the horrors we witnessed happening at that time.

But more broadly she might have meant that it was men who made the Great War that has taken so many young lives, and it was men who made it illegal for Zane to be married to a Japanese woman,

An interpretation I like better is that instead of building and protecting what they build the new successful men of early US capitalism just take what they like or send goons to do it for them (as if the duttons didn’t just take their land from the native peoples).

The last bit - men being different - can be interpreted simplistically to mean that men are not as strong as they were in her time. And I have such a big problem with women saying men are not real men anymore - this is perpetuating the patriarchy pure and simple.

he concludes it must be a new thing. And in his defence, both men and women sometimes take for granted the strength of character of their closest people.
And Kara corrects him that women have always been strong (and uncredited and unnoticed).

Let’s start with the incontrovertible: Zane acknowledges how courageous Kara is. And because he might not have noticed this kind of strength in a woman before (for example, in his own wife who endured terrible ordeal while he was semi unconscious with brain inflammation),