The Anti-Feminist Woman and Religion

Abstract

‘Are women more religious than men?’ This was a question asked in The Christian Remembrancer in 1864, in an article discussing ‘The Use and Abuse of Female Sentiment in Religion’. ‘It seems on the face of it as if they must be,’ the reviewer decides, on the grounds that women have two superior beings over them, man and God. A woman is more likely to feel her inferiority in the exercise of pure reason and abstract thought. ‘Prone to worship, prone to lean, unvisited by doubt, apt to learn, she has a pleasure in submission, in bowing to authority, in the consciousness that her trust outstrips her reason, in a double faith — faith in her religion, and in him that teaches it.’