Politics & Power Quote by Lafcadio Hearn

Hearn opens with a provocation that’s also a trap: “Is woman a religion?” It’s a question dressed as a compliment, but it’s really an x-ray of a culture. By comparing women to “religious dignitaries” and “great nobles,” he frames American respect not as simple equality but as reverence - a social choreography of deference, pedestal, taboo. The wit is in how quickly admiration curdles into critique: religion and nobility are both systems that sanctify and separate. To be “respected” like a priest or aristocrat is to be kept at a distance, granted ceremonial power while being denied ordinary agency.

The subtext is about performance. Hearn isn’t describing private feeling; he’s describing public ritual: manners, courtship, codes of speech. “Formerly accorded” hints at old-world hierarchies, suggesting America has simply reassigned its inherited instincts for rank to a new figure. In that light, chivalry becomes a kind of secular worship - less about seeing women as full citizens than about using them as moral emblems, proof that a society is refined.

Context matters: late-19th-century America was deep in the “cult of true womanhood” and the social politics of respectability, even as women were organizing for suffrage and legal rights. Hearn’s line lands because it’s double-edged: it flatters American gentility while quietly implying that reverence can be another form of control. When a group becomes an altar, it’s usually because someone else is writing the liturgy.