instance, it is currently said that women make
trouble on committees. They do; I have sat with women on committees and
will do it again as seldom as possible: their frequent inability to
understand an obvious syllogism, their passion for side issues, their
generalizations, and their particularism whenever emotion is aroused,
make committee work very difficult. But every committee has its male
member who cannot escape from his egotism or from his own conversation.
What woman does man does, only he does it less. The difference is one of
degree, not of quality.

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 th