Ok, this is a topic that I know a lot about, since I study Arabic language and literature, and the Islamic culture studies go with that. Anyway, many experts agree that burqa isn't something Islamic and that it came from the period before Islam. When Islam came to be, some famous women wore burqa as a fashion accessory and that's how it became connected to Islam. I always said that fashion is something that will ruin humanity.
And today in many countries women wear burqas and they think that it's the only way. If someday someone said that they are no longer obligated to wear them, I am sure that most of them still would do it.
Last year I studied modern Arabic literature and for that class I had to read a lot of Arabic books, and the one I liked the most was
Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood written by
Fatema Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist and feminist. The book is written in the form of memoirs, but mostly deals with Mernissi's childhood, as harems were still legal in Morocco when she was a child. Anyway, Mernissi, a feminist, says that the women are equally responsible for the inequity as men are, and that is very well explained in the book