The Man‐Made World
Some there are, men of learning and authority, who hold that the deadening immobility of our religions, their resistance to progress and relentless preservation of primitive ideals, is due to the conservatism of women. Men, they say, are progressive by nature; women are conservative. Women are more religious than men, and
so preserve old religious forms unchanged after men have outgrown
them.
If we saw women in absolute freedom, with a separate religion devised by women, practiced by women, and remaining unchanged
through the centuries; while men, on the other hand, bounded bravely forward, making new ones as fast as they were needed, this
belief might be maintained. But what do we see? All the old religions made by men, and forced on the women whether they liked it or not.
Often women not even considered as part of the scheme—denied souls—given a much lower place in the system—going from the service of their father‘s gods to the service of their husbands—
having none of their own. We see religions which make practically no place for women, as with the Moslem, as rigidly bigoted and unchanging as any other.
We see also this: that the wider and deeper the religion, the more human, the more it calls for practical applications in Christianity—
the more it appeals to women. Further, in the diverging sects of the Christian religion, we find that its progressiveness is to be measured, not by the numbers of its women adherents, but by their relative freedom. The women of America, who belong to a thousand sects, who follow new ones with avidity, who even make them, and who
also leave them all as men do, are women, as well as those of Spain, who remain contented Romanists, but in America the status of women is higher.
The fact is this: a servile womanhood is in a state of arrested development, and as such does form a ground for the retention of ancient ideas. But this is due to the condition of servility, not to womanhood. That women at present are the bulwark of the older forms of our religions is due to the action of two classes of men: the men of the world, who keep women in their restricted position, and
the men of the church, who take every advantage of the limitations
of women. When we have for the first time in history a really civilized womanhood, we can then judge better of its effect on religion.