Quite a thing happened to the English language in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It is astonishing, really, that it happened so quickly and so entirely. I'm talking about the shift from using male nouns and pronouns as generic, to more gender-equal language ("people" instead of "men;" the current morass of pronoun confusion instead of "he" and "his"). We all know, of course, that when Tolkien writes about the race of Men he's not only referring to the ones with Y chromosomes, but the language shift (at least for me) has been so complete that to read the old usage now feels a little jarring. I think that perhaps some people who read Tolkien and find his works to be sexist are reacting not to the portrayal of the female characters but to the language.
It certainly can't be argued that Tolkien wrote women as weak, inferior and/or dependent on men. All of the examples that have been brought up (Eowyn, Galadriel, Goldberry, Arwen, Luthien, Erendis) seem to show the opposite: every time a woman appears in a story she is strong, important, influential. I'd even count Lobelia S.-B. among these ranks--one needn't be pleasant to be influential. It's true that male characters ten to outnumber females: all of the members of the Fellowship, for example, were male (even the pony!), but this too does not imply that women were somehow lesser beings. To turn the argument around: if I write a story in which most of the characters with "screen time" are female, does that make me a man-hater?
And while we're at it, let's not forget Ancalime!
