Just so you don't think I'm picking on Muslims for their "honor" killing of women, I want you to know that I am an equal opportunity offender.
In India, sons are typically seen as breadwinners. According to Hindu tradition, a son is also supposed to light his parents' funeral pyre.Perhaps it is the food or water. Where did these cultures evolve such attitudes? Certainly, women in many cultures have had strictly a domestic role while the men "earned the living." But there is nothing really innate in that arrangement. Men and women in America's westward expansion faced uncertainty, hardships, hostility and scarcity... together fighting for their lives and establishing their new homes. So being poor or facing hardships is not necessarily an excuse or reason for treating women as chattel... or cattle. Somehow the Greeks and Romans avoided this attitude in their empires, so "old" is not an excuse for a culture.
Girls are often viewed as a burden because of the matrimonial dowry demanded by a groom's family.
The deep-seated discrimination makes many women more determined to have a boy because they do not want their daughters to suffer the domestic abuse and hardships that they faced, the book says.
"Better to send her straight to heaven rather than make her endure this beating and kicking around," one woman is quoted as telling the author.
[source]
I guess it is improper, in this relativistic world, to judge other cultures based on one's own. Well, I'm going to do it anyway. No matter how old, enduring, widespread or strong the cultures are that have formalized the "justification" of killing off women and girls for honor or any other reasons [let's include China in there], those cultures are simply perverse and corrupted...