Where the emotionalism of women grows more pronounced is in matters of
religion and love. There is a vague correspondence between her attitude
to the one and to the other, in outwardly Christian countries, I mean.
She often finds in religion a curious philter, both a sedative and a
stimulant. Religion is often for women an allotrope of romance; blind
as an earthworm she seeks the stars, and it is curious that religion
should make so powerful an appeal to woman, considering how she has been
treated by the faiths. The Moslem faith has made of her a toy and a
reward; the Jewish, a submissive beast of burden; the Christian, a
danger, a vessel of impurity. I mean the actual faiths, not their
original theory; one must take a faith as one finds it, not as it is
supposed to be, and in the case of woman the Christian religion is but
little in accord with the view of Him who forgave the woman taken in
adultery. The Christian religion has done everything it could to heap
ignominy upon woman: head-coverings in church, practical tolerance of
male infidelity, kingly repudiation of queens, compulsory child-bearing,
and a multiplicity of other injustices. The Proverbs and the Bible in
general are filled with strictures on "a brawling woman", "a
contentious woman"; when man is referred to, mankind is really implied.
Yet woman has kissed the religious rods. One might think that indeed she
was seduced and held only by cruelty and contempt. She is now, in a
measure, turning against the faiths, but still she clings to them more
closely than man because she is more capable of making an act of faith,
of believing that which she knows to be impossible.
The appeal of religion to woman is the appeal of self-surrender,--that
is, ostensibly. In the case of love it is the same appeal, ostensibly;
though I suspect that intuition has told many a woman who gave herself
to a lover or to a god that she was absorbing more than she gave: in
love using the man for nature whom she represents, in faith performing a
pantheistic prodigy, the enclosing of Nirvana within her own bosom.
But speculation as to the impulse of sex in relation to religion, in
Greece, in Egypt, in Latin countries, would draw me too far. I can
record only that to all appearances a portion of the religious instinct
of woman is derived from the love instinct, which many believe to be
woman's first and only motive. It is significant that among the
sixty-five cases upon which this article is based there are several
deeply religious single women, while not one of the married women shows
signs of more than conventional devotion. I incline to believe that
woman is firstly animal, secondly, intellectual; while man appears to be
occasionally animal and primarily intellectual.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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