The true source of misogyny remains lost in the past and is certainly not limited to the Western world but I must begin somewhere, and in 750-650 BC with Hesiod and the Pandora myth seems as good a place as any. Hesiod described Pandora as 'kalon kakon' – the beautiful evil – and 'From her comes all the race of womankind/the deadly female race and tribes of wives/who live with mortal men and bring them harm.' Her story is one of temptation – her inability to resist opening the vessel (I hesitate to call it a 'box' for obvious reasons) containing all the woes of the world and dooming humanity to hardship, sickness and death. A familiar story indeed; Pandora is of course a precursor of Eve. A vessel substituted with an apple, a serpent and an angry God in the background, and we have a Judeo-Christian incarnation of the same myth. Interestingly, imagery of both Eve and Pandora tends to glorify of the naked female form, so becoming at once the symbol of sin and yet the focus of the erotic gaze. Thus women become the site of temptation itself making it impossible to separate 'beauty' from 'evil'.
By the medieval period the trope of the sexually rapacious woman whose appetites needed curbing was the norm. Unwed girls were deemed a danger to themselves and needed the marriage bed for their well-being and widows, the only women allowed a modicum of jurisdiction in society, were the butt of derisive humour that hid a deep misogynystic suspicion. Chaucer's Wife of Bath is a good example of a dangerously sexual older woman, several times widowed, irrepressibly manipulative, overly talkative and bawdy, who, despite many feminist interpretations to the contrary, is treated as a figure of ridicule. Given readers were largely male I suspect she is to be laughed at, rather than with. Medieval women had few choices and were ideally expected to be the human embodiment of the Holy Virgin – chaste, silent, biddable, pure – and yet inhabited bodies that were the site of temptation. In imagery of the Holy Virgin we see her as 'mother' in which her breasts rather than being erotic, become symbolic of nurture . The sole function of women was to be mothers, and so an uneasy alliance arose between the necessarily bodily function of birth and breast-feeding and the denial of the woman's body altogether. Looking at images of the Holy Virgin we see her either as the mother figure or as the Queen of Heaven, in which she takes her place beneath God and Jesus, serving as a blue-print for the ideal family in which women were subject to their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons. But as long as women were covered, contained, accepted their place beneath men and did not rail against laws such as those that allowed husbands to beat their wives, though not so far as to cause their death, and moreover remained silent, men and women could live alongside one another in relative harmony. These kind of restrictions on women played into the prevailing notions of woman as scheming and untrustworthy, as in order to be heard or to have an effect on their world women were dependent on manipulating the men through whom their agency was necessarily mediated.
See how the two female queens are depicted below as entirely desexualised – almost like dolls or effigies and certainly not holding any dangerously erotic allure.
Interestingly, once women are no longer in positions of power, we begin to see them depicted in an increasingly erotic manner. Images of Anne of Denmark, James I's queen, show her with her breasts on display, echoing the depiction of the Virgin Mother, and by the end of the seventeenth century in a post-civil war world, images of women, and particularly Royal mistresses, by artists like Lely stripped back their clothing further, associating them once more with the figure of Eve. See the image below of the Duchess of Norfolk – all that is missing is the serpent.