As a male attending a historically female university (still 91% female) with a hardcore feminist "women's studies" department (I mean the "exterminate the entire male population" type of feminists) that all the other departments talk shit about, discussions often shift to gender equality and like topics.
In a conversation with one of my professors last week (Government Department) regarding Socrates, Plato, and Ancient Athenian Democracy, the topic of womens rights came up, specifically where and when the idea that women are second class citizens found its origins (He's 83, we get off topic alot).
With neither of US able to come up with an answer to the question, we left it at that. However, it's been bugging me ever since and I have yet to find a definitive answer.
Is monotheistic religion to blame as many people suggest, or does such stereotypical oppression have other, earlier roots?
Was it isolated to a very specific part of the world originally and if so what caused it to spread?
Much of the new testament shows great influence from Plato's theories, or at any rate those of Socrates, however Plato was never very specific in terms of gender, and when he did specify, the question was generally posed in a light of equality between the sexes.
That being said, Aristotle was fairly specific regarding male superiority, suggesting that the idea pre-dates the Christian era.
If anyone has an answer to this that would be awesome.
It seems to me that there are issues with the way you ask the question.
Most notably, the notion that "women are inferior, second-class citizens".
Although it can seem like that from our 21st century perspective, it seems to me that women were not so much inferior as they were different.
Do not get me wrong, the treatment of women was abhorrent by contemporary standard. But if you look at most societies, it is simply that women were seen as having a different role.
Let me take Ancient Greece as an example. Why couldn't women vote? Well, one of the duty of women was to take care of the family. She was seen as the guardian of family integrity and was expected to raise children. It was perceived that if women could vote, it would conflict with their duties as individuals oriented toward raising a family. After all, would someone in charge of raising a family be more hesitant to vote in a way that could send them to war? One could see the issue. Either it's true or not is not demonstrated but the line of thinking was there.
Men though had to go to war. They were the ones who controlled focal points of the economy and ensured the territorial integrity of their cities. Going to war might have involved them in an emotional way but most importantly, they were the ones who had to take a decision because it affected their interests and what was in their interests was seen as in the interest of the Polis (because prosperity, security etc.)
In other words, there was a tension between what was in the interest of the family and what was in the interest of the Polis. You can see that issue covered very clearly by the famous piece by Sophocles: Antigone.
I cannot speak for, let's say, the Middle Ages. That being said, I have often seen many discuss women as second-class citizens in Ancient Greece when I think it might be more complicated than that. I suspect something similar is at play later on though. Women are not discriminated against for purely ideological reasons (although some feminist writers could disagree with me) but often because of a certain order of things and the way society organised around them. You can see it even in the West that it is when the order of things changed that women gained additional rights.
Maybe an historian (I am a philosopher) could clarify this for me but it seems to me that the usage of women as "inferior" is a simplification of what was otherwise seen as them having a different role. Certainly, that entailed some areas in which they were seen as inferior (sex comes to mind; women had little say in how they were... used, for lack of a better word) but that overall it was due to a more holistic conception of their own communities more so than an inferior status.