Niddah and Agency

I see the rabbi's ban on single women immersing in mikvah as a way to deprive them of sexual agency. As if I needed further proof, here is a quote from Rabbi Yehuda Henkin, who discusses whether or not a single woman may go to mikvah before Yom Kippur : 'Sdey Chemed, maarechet Yom Hakiporim (No. 1, 6), prohibited unmarried women from immersing before YK lest this lead to sexual license: Having been purified from the status of niddah, and with the threat of karet removed, they would be more likely to sin". (Responsa on Contemporay Jewish issues, p. 82)Rabbi Henkin concludes a single woman may immerse before YK,

Of course, if the rabbis don't trust women, why do they trust married women to count days, to ceck themselves and to immerse - as the Talmud clearly does, as evident from its discussion about hefsek taharot? I am not sure.

Thinking further however, I realized that the Biblical prohibitions on sex during Nidah are all framed in ways that give men the sexual agency:

Vayikra 18:19 says:

19 And thou shalt not approach unto a woman to uncover her nakedness, as long as she is in the tumah of nidah

Vayikra 20:18 says:

18 And if a man shall lie with a woman having her sickness, and shall uncover her nakedness--he hath made naked her fountain, and she hath uncovered the fountain of her blood--both of them shall be cut off from among their people...

In the first case, the agency is the man's alone - he is prohibited from sleeping with the woman when she is in nidah. In the second case, both the man and the woman have agency, and both are punished.

It is interesting then, that rabbinic literature focuses on women's agency in the practice of nidah; They are the ones charged with counting, checking, etc., and it is considered one of the "women's mitzvot'. Similarly, halachik literature seems to focus more on women being punished for transgressing nidah than it does on men transgressing by sleeping with said women.

This agency within the realm of nidah however, is Talmudic in nature. The disempowering elements regarding these halachot - both the negative rhetoric about women's bodies and the prohibition on single women immersing, which disempowers women by circumscribing the times in their lives they can practice hilchot nidah, and the sexual freedom that comes from such practice - are post-Talmudic, reflecting a trend in which earlier proto-feminist voices are subsumed by the patriarchy - a trend examined by Daniel Boyarin in his book "Carnal Israel".

The question for us as modern Jews then becomes: How do we empower women in a way that is still respectful of our tradition - including the patriarchal voices within that tradition, which, whether we like it or not, are a part of our nation's intellectual history, and as such, part of its legal tradition as well?