reply to post by spangledbanner
The broader reasons why women are "kept in their place" is simple biology.
Men need to be able to control a womans womb in order to be able to have a greater chance of knowing that the offspring that come from it, (and that
they the men are plugging all of their resources into ensuring the survival of) are their own. Before DNA testing there was no fool proof way to do
this, so they did the next best thing... force, which was both hammered down and justified by social pressures and religion.
The other reason, is still biological, technically anyway, and that is "might makes right"; men are bigger and stronger and so have more leverage to
enforce that dominance that they are reproductively motivated to enforce anyway.
The last reason, and in my opinion, probably the largest motivator, is that men are more afraid of a womans sexuality than anything else on this
planet. This is how women control men and they know it. That control mitigates, or even completely negates their physical advantage, and can even
allow a woman to manipulate a man in spite of all of the social and religious controls and limits on her behavior.
Judaism, which is where a lot of our modern mythology and sensibilities about this come from, came into power facing an opposition that included a
very powerful, very rich, long established matriarchal religious paradigm. Part of why we have so much vehemence against women in the religions that
you mentioned (not that there isn't plenty in others), is because they had to twist the contemporary mythology and make women bad in order to
discredit that rival religion.