Leadership Quote by Annie Besant

A “necessary evil” is the kind of phrase that pretends to be reluctant realism while quietly licensing cruelty. Besant drags that logic into the light: if women are framed as unavoidable temptation, then contempt becomes not a personal failing but a credential. Her second clause is the knife twist. By claiming “the greatest saints” are those who “despise women the most,” she isn’t just accusing individual churchmen of misogyny; she’s indicting a reward system that converts prejudice into holiness.

The intent is polemical but strategic. Besant, speaking as a philosopher and a public radical formed in the currents of late-Victorian freethought and women’s rights, understands institutions don’t survive on arguments alone; they survive on prestige. So she targets sanctity, the Church’s most powerful cultural currency. If sainthood is socially constructed through exemplars, then who gets canonized tells you what the institution wants to reproduce in ordinary life.

The subtext is that this is not an accident of “old times” but a theological technology: women cast as bodies, snares, sources of disorder; men cast as minds, discipline, salvation. That split makes female exclusion feel metaphysical rather than political. Besant’s language is deliberately sweeping - “for centuries” - because she’s not litigating footnotes; she’s describing a pattern of rhetoric that shaped laws, marriages, education, and self-conception.

It works because it turns piety into a mirror. If your holiness requires an enemy, Besant suggests, it isn’t holiness at all; it’s hierarchy wearing a halo.