From Eve to Dawn: Origins

This book, a cross-cultural look at the place of women in societies from the Neolithic period to the end of the first millennium AD, was quite possibly the most depressing book I've ever read.

Which is kind of surprising, because I was already familiar with a lot of the individual subject areas being discussed, but hadn't really considered them in the aggregate. The view you get when you do that is that regardless of how a society is organized, regardless of whether or not it's religious, regardless of its economic organization ... men treat women like garbage. You'd think that, as a group, we'd learn that this is not only immoral, it also slows the pace of societal advancement, but apparently we NEVER DO.