I am sorry. I am just so fed up with that claim. I may have been a little sharp. It is just that ever since it became fashionable to call Tolkien sexist this claim is delivered as a give truth without any real backing in the text.

a. Tolkien cannot be called sexist simply because he writes about a sexist culture. The extrapolation from work to author does not hold. Nor does it go the other way. Tolkien may have been sexist; he may not have been. No way of telling.

b. Whether the culture he writes about is sexist, well, that is very much open to question (as I can see has already been debated). But a facile "women don't fulfil the criteria of a strong man (ie. battle prowess)" is the stupidest argument I come across (and the most common) (yes, I am getting angry again as I type. Please forgive). I am so sick and tired of modern authors who think feminism is inverting the roles or riddling their books with female rulers and generals. It hampers their writing, and they are probably doing it because Tolkien was accused of anything from sexism to racism. It leads to overcompensation. I digress.

c. Apart from the NUMEROUS leading ladies already mentioned, I draw your attention to Gandalf's words to Eomer when Eowyn is ill:

`My friend,' said Gandalf, ´you had horses, and deeds of arms, and the free fields; but she, born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch hm falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on.
...
But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?'

About as clear a statement of first wave feminism as you are likely to get. Unless you are looking for happy women tractordrivers, which is the result of this demand for bloody strong women all the time. Social realism did not give us many good works of art.