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Could it be that Tolkien wanted to write a tale that did not have an obvious "moral", and thus he "had" to leave women out of the active roles?? Let me explain:
A woman in the Fellowship would have been a "statement" of one kind or another -- what that statement may have been I don't know, but it would have clearly been something put there for an effect. Given Tolkien's predilection for telling a story that has meaning over using his story to get a meaning across, such a gesture would have been too 'obvious' for him??
I am really very uncertain of myself here but I felt compelled to float this idea.
Put another way, having a woman in the Fellowship might have -- to Tolkien's mind -- proved to be a distraction insofar as the point of his tale is about the Ring and it's effect on Frodo and the others around him; to have a woman there so pointedly being, well, a woman and not a man might have introduced a theme or idea that does not directly 'play' to the one that the Fellowship was supposed to play toward??
Again, getting less comfortable. It would be so much easier if there were no Eowyn -- then I could say that Tolkien was clearly a sexist and didn't want or see the need for interesting women!
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Scribbling scrabbling.
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