This is just my observation from life… the more responsible and caring a woman’s husband is, the more likely she will read the NT submission passages literally. The more passive or mean or noncommunicative her husband is, the less she will be able to comfortably imagine that God really made gender as a functional heirarchy. And “imagine” is indeed the right verb. Our vision of marriage comes from our experience of our parents’ marriage and of our marriage. Vision first, before we even approach the texts. So if Paul’s comments jar us, we either respond as if he represents God’s view and therefore that his vision is right, no matter what ours is, or we look for some exegetical trick to make his vision like ours.
Universality of application, then, is a handy exegetical diluter. It works like this: If you can find a passage that connects a command or exhortation to everyone, you can use that universal injunction to cancel out a more specific passage. You just brush off the more specific language as if it does not actually say anything. So, submission: because Paul tells the married couple in one place to submit to one another, the other places where he tells the wife to submit to her husband do not actually mean anything additional. (Which means, of course, the more specific application is redundant.)
In this way, the several plain and simple passages describing a submissive wife are imagined away, usually by people – men as well as women – whose only life experiences around the word “submission” are negative. Experience forms imagination, which then dominates the text.
Occasionally, the opposite: you can find women who write glowingly of the privilege of wifely submission. If you can look a little more deeply into that woman’s life, you’ll find that her husband is JUST GOOD TO HER. This is, of course, his biblical role, and ought not be anything unusual though, sadly, it is. My point is that this woman reads the NT passages on wifely submission with a comfortable imagination, because her husband has made her submission pleasant for her- again, as he should.