It's an interesting question. I'd say that part of what's so powerful about these symbols is that their largeness, the way they admit being spoken of in capital letters, justifies and absorbs radical things done in their name. Men in tuxedos stoically go down with the titanic while the lifeboats are loaded up; lynch mobs go out looking for revenge for slights real or imagined...It is a justification of a certain way of life, holding up what is in some ways the epitome as sacred.

One of the burdens which women have had to bear in western culture is that of incarnating the culture and thus not being entirely free to be themselves. Just observe your own assumptions, or emotional reactions to, the fact of a child's having a French mother and an American father, or vice versa. Again, I don't mean this of particular people, just am trying to scare up the curious and deep stereotypes around the words.

But again, the problem with representing the culture is that you don't represent yourself. You incarnate an ideal which makes someone else's way of life possible. Virginia Woolf complained that women were trained to be mirrors who reflected men back to themselves at twice their natural size... Culture does that. So that by defending the culture, a man defends his own right to exist as he does, but has the advantage of feeling it is a deeply selfless act.

That's an interesting image of the mirror reflecting men twice their size. It reminds me of a Christina Rossetti poem, In The Artist's Studio:

One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
A saint, an angel -- every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

It speaks to the ideal of womanhood. But what is the ideal? What do men expect from their female counterparts? In this poem Rossetti blames men for the creation of the ideal at all. It is through the transference of art from generation to generation that the myth of the female was born. “That mirror gave back all her loveliness.” It’s weird that a mirror is the giver of her loveliness when the beauty should really reside in the actual person. By this Rossetti shows us how artistic imitation is more of a fun-show mirror that makes us look thinner and taller than we actually are. This allows the artist to alter the realities of life to fit his own desires and change the realities of the world. This means he can create beauty where it doesn’t exist. “Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;/ Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.”

But to what extent in the lines from A Passage to India are the men also just filling roles prescribed to them from an earlier generation? If their ideal of womanhood was merely passed on to them through art and tradition established before their time then are their specific reactions at fault? So is it the ideal they are defending or the guaranteed continuity of the ideal?

How does this relate to misogyny specific to art? In the poem the male artists of the day, Rossetti implies, don’t look into a woman’s interior but rather stop at her bosom. They create women into an ideal form that they assume reflects all women “one face,/ one selfsame figure” when really the individual exists behind the body. “We found her hidden just behind those screens.” The use of “her” allows us to differentiate the woman of that line from the artist’s vision. “He feeds upon her face by day and night.” By feeding on these idealized women, saints and angels, the male artist is sticking to societal norms that continue to keep him and his art prosperous. But by doing so he fails to represent truth which Rossetti suggests can’t be simplified to just one meaning. “The same one meaning, neither more nor less.”

In the last two lines of the sonnet her opinion on that matter is most apparent through the repetition of “Not as she is.” Rossetti stresses the importance of the accurate portrayal of reality. But isn't reality just another artistic ideal? Can we blame male artists for their artistic and cultural inheritance likewise can we expect reality to stay stagnant from one artistic generation to the next?

Coming upon this discussion again, I'd also add that the colonial aspect makes for an interesting dynamic here too. For the British in India to talk about "women and children" is, as Hanna says, a way of invoking a non-negotiable protectiveness which "justifies" the brutality of any act. To go to a country which didn't ask to be occupied, to take your innocent loved ones with you and to turn upon the natives with a murderous rage if anything should happen to these innocents -- that's a particularly complicated political move. Others on this site may have more to say about the use of innocents as shields in the politics of our own day.

On a more mundane level, I think it's a move we see in human psychology a fair amount too.  For instance -- though I'm quite diplomatic, it's happened to me on occasion that an acquaintance will roll out some idea of theirs, just off-handedly, and  I'll react by suggesting some changes. Some people are happy for the chance to discuss, and others turn on you with all the anguish of an exposed wound: so you want to attack my idea do you, well that's an attack I'll take personally, the question of whether or not I wanted to hear the idea at all having fallen by the wayside.