One of the things to note is that before the industrial revolution, women literally ran some of the most important sectors of the economy. In medieval Iceland

One of the things to note is that before the industrial revolution, women literally ran some of the most important sectors of the economy. In medieval Iceland the cloth that they made was even legal tender. Talk about "making money" (literally)! I actually see modernist feminism as a response specifically to the fact that the industrial revolution largely completed an economic trend that had been going on since the late Middle Ages, which was the displacement of women economically and the taking over of these industries by men. Women, deprived of their historical economic place in Western society, had to find a new economic place, and the need for this was the catalyst for women's suffrage, the women entering the factories and schools, and the like. This lead to an extremely male-normal society, though, and it has meant that women are still suffering for that. The genders cannot be equal where one is normal and the other not. Note that Robbie Davis-Floyd documents in her (excellent) book "Birth as an American Rite of Passage" that in medical textbooks (at least in the early 90's when she was writing this one) that male figures were overrepresented among diagrams of healthy anatomy, while female figures were overrepresented among diagrams of disease. That doesn't mean that there aren't biological differences that don't come into play. But how those differences manifest is very much tied to culture. But culture is not without limits--- it is subject to functional imperatives, both biological and social in nature. Consider this: marriage, as an institution which centers around procreation and childraising, is more universally recognized in ritual practices than funerals are. There are social imperatives at work even when biological ones are not (certainly there is no biological imperative to get married). The social imperative there is in fact quite obvious when you start looking at differences between paternity and maternity considerations. Women are mothers if they have given birth. Men are fathers typically if they are recognized by society or the law as such, and this is only loosely tied to biology (even in the US today--- consider that 52% of never-married mothers never apply for child support, often out of a desire not to have further contact with the putative biological father, but in other cultures a child born out of wife-swapping or wife-loaning is always the child of the woman's husband). So a social imperative of managing paternity considerations and providing stable economic units for childraising often are decisive here.