The Future of Womanhood
What the major traditions improved, what modernity added, and why formal rights alone have proved insufficient.
Before looking at where things stand and where they might go, it is worth acknowledging, briefly and fairly, what the major monotheistic traditions actually did for women's condition compared with what came before them.
Judaism established formal marriage contracts (the ketubah) that guaranteed women financial protection and set out the obligations a husband owed his wife. This was a legal innovation, not just a custom, and it gave women enforceable rights within marriage earlier than most surrounding cultures. Jewish law also protected women's property rights within marriage more strongly than much of the ancient world.
Christianity strongly opposed infant exposure, a practice that killed far more unwanted infant girls than boys in the Greco-Roman world. It insisted on the principle of consent in marriage. Through monasticism it also opened a real third path for women beyond marriage or early death. Abbesses such as Hildegard of Bingen controlled land, wealth, and intellectual authority in a world that offered women few other such opportunities.
Islam improved women's inheritance and property rights relative to pre-Islamic Arabian custom. It guaranteed women a fixed share of inheritance by religious law at a time when many surrounding cultures gave women nothing, and it recognised women's right to own and manage property independently within marriage.
Each tradition, in its historical setting, closed real gaps. That is worth stating plainly rather than glossing over.
What secularism and feminism added
The modern secular and feminist movements added a different but largely complementary layer: formal legal and civic equality that none of the older traditions had fully delivered. The right to vote, equal-pay laws, no-fault divorce, reproductive autonomy, protection from workplace discrimination, and access to higher education and every profession were twentieth-century achievements. They were hard-won and, on the whole, genuine expansions of women's practical freedom to shape their own lives rather than have that shape decided entirely by family or church. Whatever later disagreements exist within feminism, this basic layer of legal personhood is not seriously contested by any mainstream position today.
Where things actually stand
Yet in the country that pioneered much of this legal architecture — Britain, and much of Western Europe — the picture on physical safety has grown more troubling, even as legal equality has continued to expand. The data, drawn mainly from the UK's Office for National Statistics Crime Survey for England and Wales, is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing.
Sexual assault prevalence among women fell for a decade after 2005, then reversed. For women aged 16–59, the survey shows a rise from 1.7% in the year ending March 2015 to 3.8% in the year ending March 2025 — roughly four times the rate for men (0.7%). Public sexual harassment remains common. A widely cited 2021 national survey found that 71% of women had experienced some form of sexual harassment in public spaces, rising to 86% among women aged 18–24. Many women now change their daily behaviour — avoiding certain routes, times, or forms of transport — as a result.
This is not a story of legal rights being taken away. No one is repealing women's rights on paper. It is a story of physical and social safety pulling apart from legal equality. Women in Western Europe today hold more formal rights than at any point in history, yet many report less confidence that they can walk home, use public transport, or simply exist in public space without fear.
How the divergence actually happens
The statistics establish the problem, not its cause. What follows is my account of several mechanisms that may help explain the gap.
The gap between formal rights and lived safety is not mysterious, and it does not require a single villain to explain it. It is the predictable result of several structural patterns working together — the same kind of diffuse, no-single-culprit dynamic that produces poor outcomes in any complex system, whether a traffic network, a market, or a society's safety culture.
Diffuse costs, concentrated benefits. Many of the policies and social arrangements that shape a society's safety climate are chosen because their benefits are visible and immediate to the people making the decisions. Their costs arrive later, fall on people several steps removed, and are spread so thinly that no single actor feels responsible.
Abstraction outrunning attention. As societies grow larger and more anonymous, the link between a choice and its consequences stretches longer. The people most affected — often women moving through public space every day — become the last to be consulted and the first to absorb the results.
Erosion of local density. In the past, informal guardianship did a great deal of the protective work that formal law was never designed to do alone. Stable households, involved extended family, and neighbours who knew one another and noticed when something was wrong provided a background level of watchfulness. As communities become more transient and anonymous, and as the adults who once supplied that watchfulness become fewer or less connected, opportunistic harm becomes easier, whatever the law on the books says.
Treating protection as one value among many, rather than as non-negotiable. When the safety of the vulnerable is treated as just one consideration to be balanced against others — administrative ease, avoiding awkward conversations, competing priorities — it will periodically lose that balancing act. Societies that have done this well in the past treated the protection of the vulnerable as a sacred, binding duty, specifically placed beyond ordinary trade-off reasoning.
None of these patterns requires blaming any group defined by origin, belief, or identity. The honest question is not "who did this," but "which of these patterns are we allowing to run unchecked, and what would it take to check them?"
Teaching the next generation to close the gap
This is where personal and small-community action has real leverage, independent of national policy or election cycles. The philosophical materials of pre-Christian Europe, used selectively, offer a useful framework rather than mere nostalgia.
Teach protection as sacred and non-negotiable, not as a policy preference. The strong are bound to protect the vulnerable — that is the core of xenia and megalopsychia, not a gender hierarchy argument. A child raised to see protecting siblings, friends, and community members as a matter of honour and duty, rather than an optional virtue, grows into an adult far less likely to let that duty erode under pressure.
Teach distinct, not merely equal, honour for women's roles and contributions. The Pythia at Delphi, the Vestal Virgins in Rome, and the Norse völur held real, exclusive authority, not just symbolic inclusion in a male-defined hierarchy. A framework that teaches girls their contributions carry their own weight and honour — not only when measured against male achievement — builds a stronger foundation of self-respect and communal esteem than a purely sameness-based model.
Teach clear-eyed tracking of outcomes over comfortable intentions. Children can be taught, without cruelty toward anyone, to ask a simple, consistent question of any rule, custom, or arrangement: what result has this actually produced for the people it was meant to protect? This is not cynicism. It is the habit of checking a chain of cause and effect rather than resting on how a choice was intended to feel.
Teach reciprocity and the value of local density. Those with strength raised to treat the protection of the vulnerable in their own circle as a normal, high-status duty carry that instinct into adulthood as habit rather than performance. Those who benefit from that protectiveness raised to recognise, value, and reinforce it help sustain it across a generation.
Teach that fertility, motherhood, and lineage are a sacred centre, not a lesser calling. The Eleusinian Mysteries placed the bond between mother and daughter, and the continuity of generations, at the centre of the sacred. A framework that restores this as genuinely high-status — without using that status to block a woman's independence, education, or ambition — gives the next generation a fuller picture of what a flourishing life can look like.
None of this requires new laws, large organisations, or the outcome of any election. It requires parents, extended family, and small communities deciding that these are the habits worth building deliberately into how children are raised — and doing so consistently enough that the habits outlast any one generation's particular circumstances. The legal rights women already hold remain genuinely valuable. They become more valuable still when the surrounding culture once again treats the physical safety and honoured standing of women as a non-negotiable floor, built and maintained on purpose, rather than an assumption left to maintain itself.