If you locate the root of oppression in women's biological sex, then nothing will liberate us. Whilst its not new for women to be treated as less than human, I'm thinking about 550bc Athens as an example, it was the division of labour into the public and private that brought about the subordination of women. And yes that was possible because of our sex. However this distinction and separation between the private and public spheres comes into being with the formation of class society/city states and a change in the mode of production from tribal/small self sufficiency to creating surplus/exchange systems that allow one class to live off of the exploitation of another. As with slavery.
It's not the case that women's oppression didn't exist in pre-industrial and non-capitalist societies. In the majority of hunter-gather societies, women are an exploited and oppressed class. I remember reading in an anthropology class of a southern African HG society, in which women collected 80 per cent of the food, did the majority of the child care, and built and disassembled the temporary huts the tribe lived in. If they failed to perform any of these tasks to their husbands' specifications, their husbands beat them. Girls from age 14 were also exchanged as chattel between men of different bands for sexual use. The anthropologists documenting this society described it as 'non socially stratified'. My point is that women have been treated as exploited caste and as property by men before property was even invented.
Just because the idea that women's oppression is rooted in biological sex is disturbing, is not a reason to reject the truth of that analysis. Women's reproductive capacity is the material basis underlying our oppression. Although it's worth specifying, as a previous poster did, that it's actually men's exploitation of that capacity, enforced through violence, that is the root, rather than our reproductive capacity per se.
I agree that it is a disturbing conclusion. In some ways it is analogous with the Marxist analysis of the class system, but the key difference is that the material conditions underlying labour exploitation can be abolished, whereas the biological differences between the sexes can't be. This blog post on the radical feminist analysis of gender explains this key point well, I think:
A fourth implication I find interesting here is the nontrivial difference between this materialist analysis, and that of, say, Marx. Marxist economic determinism also holds that culture is predicated on material conditions. For labour class politics, these conditions are economic, and in a real way this means the predicating material conditions are cultural products/organising principles in themselves. It is nontrivial, then, that the material conditions at the root of sex class politics are also biological. Can this be overcome by ‘revolution’ in the same way? If a man and woman were in a vacuum from society, would his strength and her reproductive vulnerability – and their mutual knowledge of these facts – be enough in itself to preclude the possibility of equal power distribution? Can society manufacture parameters that can overcome this, or is separatism the only way?
rootveg.wordpress.com/2014/01/15/gender-is-a-social-construct/
I think the way forward for feminists is for women grasp the fact that men have always tried to control us because we give birth (and they also deeply resent us because of this ability), and to organise politically to ensure that we reclaim the means of production, so to speak (i.e., our sexuality and reproductive capacity). This ultimately means dismantling gender, since gender is the key ideological system that enforces this control.
but this is facinating reading.