" It is the burden of the preceding pages that in a very peculiar and special sense, woman, as a sex, has suffered greatly from the influence of religion in general and from that of Christianity in particular. But woman has been, and is, one of the strongest supporters of the Churches, and to woman the priest has always paid special attention.
There is abroad, even with many men who seldom attend church themselves, and on whom religion has but a slight hold, a tact-sometimes an avowed-conviction that, although emancipation from religion is admirable in man, it is just as well for women to cherish the old beliefs and to worship at the old shrines. Evidently the belief in the inferiority of woman dies hard in this religion-soaked society of ours.
All the attempts to establish differences between men and women as a reason for maintaining various social and political inequalities are based upon caste feeling and religious prejudice. Even the assertion that woman is temperamentally and inevitably religious, in a different sense from that in which man may be called religious, is evidence of the same feeling. And it is, suggestive that when we examine the alleged dominant female qualities that are said to make woman inevitably religious, they are all found to imply inferiority to the male.