Christianity Has Retarded the Woman's Progress

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 9 pages

An unusual piece, because Blavatsky is arguing on two fronts at once. Her subject is the polemicist writing as "Saladin", whose attack on Christianity she both agrees with and picks apart — a combination that makes this more interesting than a straightforward denunciation would have been.

Where she parts company with him is on attribution. In his anxiety to load the whole burden of Europe's sexual depravity onto Christianity, she argues, Saladin generalises too freely: the ghastly immoralities of ecclesiastical history are chargeable to individuals and not to the system itself. Where she agrees with him is on the substantive charge, which she states as flatly as he does — that Christianity has done nothing to exalt woman and has, on the contrary, retarded her progress. The essay credits Saladin with exposing Christian ethics and practice with merciless severity and with confronting the reader with a formidable array of facts, while insisting that the conclusion he draws from them is the wrong one.

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