Page:Psychology of Religion.djvu/23

22. Yet, clearly, there are very many things to be taken into account besides her emotions. Priestcraft does not merely influence her more than it influences man. It is used against her far more than against the man. Considering that her education also is defective, she has far less chance of escaping. Already, as we are altering the college education of girls, we are rapidly lessening the disproportion of women in ritualistic churches.

These women, however, are a small minority. What concerns us more is the fact that generally, allowing for the fact that women far outnumber men, three women are religious to two men. What do we make of this? The exact figures I have given make the problem much smaller than most writers on the psychology of religion suppose it to be, and we need point only to a few influences or impulses to explain it.

That astute and fearless student of sex-matters, Mr. Havelock Ellis, has considered this situation (in his Man and Woman), but he started with the usual exaggerated idea of the religious disproportion of the sexes—though he incidentally reminds us that of six hundred sects described in a dictionary of religions only seven were founded by women—and I