Historical, academic explanations for the near-universal second-class citizenship of women?

Question

I just heard on the news that, in 70 countries, girls face risks by simply going to school and being girls. How did women come to be second-class citizens throughout the world? Are there any relatively non-controversial historical explanations for the origins of gender inequality?

Answer 1

Let's start saying that women as second class gender is not an historical universal. We have plenty of evidences that evolution has been full of societies based on a matrilinear jerarchy or societis where the cultural value of feminine was considerd as sacred as well as the base of their internal simbolic system of interpretation and relationship with nature and life.

Unfortunately the result of what with consider modern civilization is exactly as you describe. Evolution read as a path that goes trough agriculture, space-territory-nation, control of production and surplus would find an interpretation on the condition where the women are subjects to pregnancy and mestrual-cycle as a deficit in their capacity of acquire and mantain political, social and economical power.