Jesus. Muhammad. Gautama Buddha. We can all easily come up with the names of male messianic/prophetic figures who founded or inspired various religions.
But did any women found (or were the inspiration for) religions too? And if so, how were they received compared their male counterparts?
I’m asking specifically about real historical figures, not legendary. But if there are no historical ones, I’d love to hear about legendary women too!
Tenrikyo, one of the oldest of the Japanese new religious movements would certainly fit the bill. It was founded in 1838 by Nakayama Miki, a farmer's wife, who as the story goes was filling in for either a Buddhist monk or a shamaness in a ritual to heal her ailing son, when she was possessed by Tenri-Ō-no-Mikoto, the Creator or Parent God, who possessed her body and demanded that it be given over as a shrine. Nakayama, also known as Oyasama, henceforth sold her belongings and lived a life of poverty, serving as the fount of revelation for this deity. Over the course of her life she wrote two primary scriptures: the Ofudesaki and the Mikagura-uta. (Parenthetically, though church tradition claims Oyasama wrote these with pen and brush, the usage of elaborate waka poetry structure as well as the possibility that she was likely illiterate may dictate that we take this claim with a pinch of salt.) The third scripture of Tenrikyo was written by Iburi Izō, who took over as spiritual head of the movement upon Oyasama's death.
For several decades following Oyasama's revelation, little was done to spread the word of the new church. It was only during the later 1860s that the movement began to gain steam. The ability of Tenrikyo and other new religious movements of the time to attract the rural population in droves may be attributed to their focus on equality and solidarity, which helped preserved a sense of cultural identity in the context of the wide-ranging social and industrial changes of the Meiji restoration. The foundling religion promptly ran into roadblocks with respect to the crystallization of Shinto as the state religion. By some counts their membership topped one million (again, pinch of salt) in the waning years of the century, which attracted the attention of the new government. Police placed Tenrikyo under surveillance, and the church repeatedly applied for and was refused independent church status (i.e., outside the umbrella of State Shinto) under Meiji religious policy. Increasing repression led the church to bow to pressure; in 1903 it produced a revised doctrine known as Meiji doctrine, which changed aspects of the scripture and services in order to comply with official Shinto doctrine, and eventually in 1908 it was recognized as the 13th and last of the Sect Shinto groups. However, more repression followed in the wake of 1930s, including the outright banning of some of the scriptures as well as even more odious restrictions on rituals and rites. Following the war and the lifting of the 1940 Religious Organizations Law, the church gradually returned to its pre-1903 doctrines, restoring the original scriptures.
What differentiates Tenrikyo as a separate religion on its own, rather than merely a Shinto-derived sect, lies in its continued separate and novel organization, teachings, rites, and activities. Certainly the authorities recognized a great deal of difference with state Shinto which accounts for the repression and pressure the group faced to conform. Though aspects of this forced conformity can still be seen in certain teachings and rituals, the new primary deity of Tenri-Ō-no-Mikoto; the eschatological salvation promised in Ofudesaki (though distinct from Christian millenialism, and now downplayed to an extent in modern Tenrikyo); the belief in bodies "borrowed" from Tenri-Ō-no-Mikoto; and many other aspects and beliefs of Tenrikyo point to an religion that stands apart from Shinto. Plus, a massive, bitchin' temple headquarters in a city named after your religion certainly doesn't hurt.
I haven't cited anything in many years and I am not about to submit to the tyranny of the MLA handbook again, so in no particular order:
"The Formation of Sect Shinto in Modernizing Japan" - Inoue Nobutaka
"Images of God in Japanese New Religions" - KISALA, Robert
"Religious Freedom Under the Meiji Constitution (Part 4)" - Abe Yoshiya
"The Eschatology of Japanese New and New New Religions From Tenri-kyo to Kofuku no Kagaku" - Yamashito, Akiko
"Feminism and Religion in Contemporary Japan: Editors' Introduction." - Kawahashi Noriko and Kuroki Masako
various Tenrikyo church documents
There are a number of "new religions" (shinshukyo) in Japan that were founded by women. These religions are named new religions in part to differentiate them from "older" religions like Buddhism and Christianity, though many of the new religions adapt or incorporate certain aspects of Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto, and Christianity into their tenets. One of the other ways they're defined (by Tsushima Michihito and others) is that they're often also characterized as being founded by a charismatic leader who experiences a divine revelation / instruction to found a religion, and have some sense of salvation, and by a sense of apocalyptic warning (ie: the end of days is about to come, the world has fallen into decay, thus we need a new leader). According to Inose Yuri it was in the 1970s that there began to emerge an additional category, "new new religions" (shin shin shukyo) to separate adherents who were joining in the 1970s and later because the individuals were poor, sick, or from some kind of broken family situation (this is where you see religions like SokaGakkai and Aum Shinrikyo). Both "new religions" and "new new religions" were criticized by society at large, and at times persecuted by everyday Japanese. That included mass media (newspapers, etc.) writing stories of sexual scandals, particularly when the founder of the religion was a woman. At other times the Japanese government stepped in to suppress new religions that were seen as gaining too much power and challenging the power and doctrine of the state.
The earlier New religions had some interesting examples of women founders:
Tenrikyo was founded by Nakayama Miki in the 1840s. This is one religion that was critiqued from the beginning by newspapers claiming there were sexual scandals to be found, in part because Nakayama preached gender equality - this caused a great deal of alarm. That being said, the basic tenet and doctrine of Tenrikyo is that humankind was created for the sole purpose of joyful living, and if humans realize joy, God shares in it. This was not all about fun, but also about offering aid to those suffering from disease. For example, there's a story of Nakayama curing a young girl suffering from some kind of contagious disease by laying hands on her to nurse her to health.
Oomotokyo was founded by Deguchi Nao in the 1890s. Deguchi was pretty radical in many ways - she did not benefit from the the social, cultural, and industrial efforts the Japanese government had been instituting in early Meiji, and called for an overthrow of the economic system and even openly attacked the emperor. Her vision initially attracted rural peasants and laborers who felt they were victims of the social/industrial transformation, and thus even though she came from money, because her family had lost it, she was seen as one of the common people. The radical calls for revolution are then part of the reason why, though the real expansion of the sect was via her successor, and the Japanese state basically attempted to suppress them in 1921 and 1935. Yet the very fact that the government suppressed Oomotokyo shows that it had some wider influence.
As to how these religions were received (or how they were compared to their male counterparts):
The new religions were looked at as upstarts, as cults, as sensationalist and intentionally apocalyptic. As I mentioned above, the mainstream press didn't like them, the mainstream religions didn't appreciate or respect them either as mainstream religions had more conservative views about economic transformation, the Japanese government, etc. And the Japanese government itself at times jailed or sought to suppress these movements as they were challenges to the state authority and power, particularly as they had visions of the present and the past that did not correlate with the kind of future was being envisioned (one of the many slogans at the time was "civilization and enlightenment" which demanded that all feel as if they were benefiting from the industrial, political, and cultural change), nor the past as it was being articulated by the Meiji state.
For further reading check out Inoue Nobutaka, who is one of the major scholars in Japanese language on new religions, has an older article, but I think it's English translation is available, detailing a bunch of the more recent religions, "Recent Trends in the Study of Japanese New Religions"
Nancy Stalker's Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburō, Oomoto, and the Rise of a New Religion in Imperial Japan.
If you're curious about New Religions in general, there's actually a really nicely done Oxford Bibliography "Buddhism and New Religions in Japan (Shinshūkyō)" by Erica Baffelli
Christian Science was founded by a woman called Mary Baker Eddy in the 19th century. In spite of the name, Christian Science is usually viewed as distinct from Protestant Christianity. Christian Scientists situate their theology within Christanity, with the extra revealed Scripture of Eddy's Science and Health, much as Mormons consider the Book of Mormon to be an extra revealed text in addition to the Bible; however, like Mormons, Christian Scientists have not always been accepted as Christian by other Christian groups. In particular, Christian Scientists are non-trinitarian, which is often one of the main criterion of exclusion used by mainstream Christians to exclude offshoot groups from being part of Christianity.
Eddy's view that the material world is fundamentally an illusion and that the spiritual world is the only reality is also not in keeping with traditional Christian teachings about the Incarnation, and was a common element in ancient and medieval "heresies" such as the Gnostics and the Cathars. If the material world is not real, then the Incarnation of Jesus taking on human flesh cannot be real, so this is often the most contentious point from the point of view of Christian orthodoxy. So while Eddy considered herself to be reforming Christianity's teachings, for all intents and purposes today Christian Science is usually considered a distinct religion.
Eddy was a charismatic leader, like many founders of religious movements. Her teachings drew many adherents and also much criticism, with some describing Christian Science as an anti-Christian cult. Christian Scientists call her the "discoverer" of Christian Science and refer to her even after her death as "our beloved leader". She had been chronically ill since childhood and eventually sought the treatment of Phineas Pankhurst Quimby, who practiced "mental healing" predicated on the belief that all illnesses were caused by the mind. Eddy recovered from a nearly fatal fall by, according to her, reading the Bible, and she fully believed that God had cured her. From then on she claimed to perform many miracle healings of everything from tuberculosis to cancer.
Although her teachings of mental healing became relatively popular, they always had their detractors. Science and Health teaches that sickness is a mental error. Christian Scientists at the time encouraged people to forego any medical treatment in favour of spiritual healing: "Either human faith or the divine Mind is the healer and [...] there is no efficacy in a drug". At its core, Christian Science teaches that the spiritual reality of a person is perfectly healthy, and that if they are experiencing illness, it is through their own spiritual failing. The main opposition to Eddy and her teachings, unsurprisingly, has come from the medical community, although they have received condemnation from mainstream Christians as well. Between 1887 and the early 1990s, over fifty legal cases involved preventable deaths of Christian Scientists who were denied medical treatment for their diseases, including children - between 1975 and 1995 alone, 28 Christian Scientist children died from being denied medical treatment. Christian Science has responded by lobbying for religious exemptions in such cases, though some parents have been convicted of manslaughter or pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment over the years.
Prosecutions against Christian Scientists for medical malpractice began in the 1880s. In 1895, the American Medical Association sought to make it legally much harder for Christian Scientists to practice their "medicine" without a license. They also ran into legal trouble for refusing to vaccinate children in the late 19th century in the midst of smallpox epidemics. In fact, the first state law granting religious exemption for anti-vaxxers was passed in New York in 1966 due to the lobbying of Christian Scientists. While the Christian Scientists received some supporters in other quasi-Christian quarters, such as from the Jehovah's Witnesses who also practiced miracle healing, they were widely criticized by secular writers, most famously Mark Twain, whose daughter Clara had converted to the religion. Articles critical of the high prices Eddy charged for her teaching also appeared regularly, and Christian Science was regularly satirized.
In 1926, Christian Science reached its highest ever number of adherents, about 270,000. It has been in steady decline since then, with only 1,249 remaining worldwide (965 of these in the United States) as of 2015. Women were initially drawn more to Christian Science than men, since it was one of relatively few organisations offering professional training to women who could go on to be paid practitioners after only 12 lessons, and medical treatment for women was often poor in the 19th century. Eddy would also refer to God as both Mother and Father, which was attractive to some early feminists. In 1906, 72% of Christian Scientists were women. Although their numbers have always been small, they have included people in high-ranking positions in society, such as President Nixon's chief of staff H. R. Haldeman and actresses like Doris Day and Joan Crawford. Several famous actors were raised in Christian Science households - Ellen DeGeneres, Robin Williams, and Audrey Hepburn, to name a few of the best-known.
Eddy's teachings were also influential in the creation of offshoot movements, such as New Thought, which was created by Christian Scientists who wanted to incorporate more non-Christian influences into their belief system. Emma Curtis Hopkins was originally a student from Eddy but diverged from her when it came to Trinitarian ideas, the importance of Eastern religions, and the reality and holiness of the material world. After her split with Eddy, Hopkins's teachings were critical to the organization of the New Thought movement, of which she is often considered one of, if not the, founders. Originally New Thought was mostly made up of disaffected Christian Scientists, but it gained steam as its own movement. In 1918 she was elected the first president of the New Thought Association.
New Thought is less of a religion than a religious movement, since it's rather loosely organized. It shares the interest in mind-cure with Christian Science, which has drawn it some of the same criticisms. Because New Thought is expressed through multiple sub-organizations, rather than a single unified Church, it has a much wider dissemination of its ideas than Christian Science. Historically, New Thought had a profound influence on the early American feminist movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a devotee, and several of Hopkins's students contributed to The Woman's Bible. In the modern day, it's estimated that their publishing and educational activities reach 2.5 million people every year.
In fact, the popularity today of "manifestation", the idea that if you visualize your desired outcome it will manifest, can be traced back to New Thought and its milieu. New Thought authors developed Helena Blavatsky's idea of the Law of Attraction. This is the idea that positive thoughts attract positive outcomes and negative thoughts attract negative outcomes. From its origins in New Thought, this idea has become much more mainstream - after all, most people on social media will have heard of "manifesting" but not of New Thought. You got pop psychology versions of the idea in the self-help genre with such works as The Power of Positive Thinking published by Norman Vincent Peale in 1952. New Thought ideas became very popular among New Agers in the mid- and late-20th centuries. All of this has coalesced in the recent popularity of "manifestation". While it would be wrong to say that Hopkins is the "founder" of the idea of manifestation/Law of Attraction, the movement she spearheaded is largely responsible for the proliferation of this idea today.
I'd like to start out by noting that the differentiation between legendary and historical can become relatively unimportant in the discussion of religion: if you're trying to understand Christians, pulling apart the "objective" historical facts of his life will tell you literally nothing about his followers. Only those facts of his life taken as such by his followers help us to account for their beliefs and their lives. That being said, I understand why you've framed your question in that way.
Second, I'll start with a perennial disclaimer of mine: the concept of religion as a "thing" at all, i.e. something that is a unique, separable aspect of life, is not universal in any way. It exists in some places and times, but much of the timespace of human history has been dominated by cultures that did not divide existence into sacred and profane, into religion and secularity, into religion and culture. So a legendary founder of a society was by default the founder of the things you would identify as their "religion," but they most likely would not understand why you were trying to sift their life into different component parts like that: their history, way of life, farming, fighting, burial practices, healing, etc. were all just one fluid system. And yes, these figures would be legendary... think Adam and Eve style, but they may be animal, animal-like, or some kind of otherworldly figure, and many were, in fact, women. Although here as well it is important to note that gender is not always a binary in history: it can be fluid, composed of a greater number of genders, etc.
Now, turning to concrete answers placed within written recorded history (which points to the problematic preference for written over oral history in "the West," such as it exists), but, more importantly, in my rough time and place of study, I will focus on the north Atlantic, essentially England and the US.
Now, it's well to note that it's no mistake you do not find female prophetic figures with longstanding and widespread followings: that patriarchal sexism has worked tirelessly against this cannot be gainsaid. So most of my examples that follow will be "kind of" answers: women who were instrumental in the founding of religious movements, or commanded religious followings in spite of the odds.
The most unequivocal answer I can give you is the Shakers. The Shakers derive their name from an early moniker, "the shaking Quakers." Officially, the group calls (yes, calls! Despite what many believe, they still exist.) themselves the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, but they initially earned this former appellation through their frenetic devotions (dancing, shaking, etc.), which were falling out of favor with Quakers (whom we'll return to shortly), likely because of a constant pressure in US-English religion: respectability via conformity. Their origins are traced to a couple, Jane and James Wardley, who founded a devotional community committed to the aforementioned forms of worship in spite of their unpopularity. Perhaps more important was one of their early followers, Ann Lee, eventually known as "Mother Ann." Mother Ann was instrumental in cementing many of their most identifiable characteristics, namely their millenarianism and especially their celibacy: her multiple stillbirths had convinced her that the Lord found sex sinful. The Shakers are known as well for communitarian lifestyles, like another group I'll turn to.
Quakerism, formally known today as the Religious Society of Friends, is a non- to anti-hierarchical system of belief stressing equality of all people before God and the presence of God (or the Inner Light as it is often known) in all people. Now, Quakerism is generally regarded as having been founded by a man named George Fox in England in the mid-seventeenth century (the Shakers broke off about a hundred years later), but there is a woman who was equally important to its elaboration and ultimate survival: Margaret Fell. Fell is widely acknowledged as the mother of Quakerism and, perhaps appropriately, would later marry Fox, becoming Margaret Fell Fox. When they first met, she was married to a judge named Thomas Fell and had seven children by him. Though Thomas Fell would never convert, Margaret offered their house, legal counsel and behind-the-scenes help, and significant monetary contributions to the early movement. In part because Quakerism believes in a "priesthood of all believers," but also because of her own intelligence and ability, Fell would command a central role in ministering to early Friends and leading the cause of their often confrontational efforts at reforming the wider Christian Church.
We might identify a similar figure in this last vein in Anne Hutchinson, who played a central role in what was called the Antinomian Controversy. Hutchinson was a member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, having followed her favorite preacher, John Cotton, to the colonies. Hutchinson would take further Cottons insistence that good works did not reflect that one was saved, the majority view among Puritans at the time. Like the Quakers, Hutchinson believed in a direct, mystic connection to God, meaning that one could experience revelation directly, not mediated by a pastor or even by the Bible. The Puritans would hang, jail, and banish numerous Quakers for these ideas, in fact. But Hutchinson commanded a significant following, first among women (women would not be allowed to orate publicly in most situations, and never to a mixed audience) and then to a wider following. She amassed such a large following that she eventually got placed on trial, essentially for disturbing the peace of the colony through her subversive preaching. Non-coincidentally, one of the most troubling aspects of Hutchinson's behavior for the leaders of the colony was, very simply, her gender. Women should submit to men in all matters, not least of all religion, so the thinking went. Hutchinson ultimately lost her trial, in part for daring to speak over/down to the men trying her, though her life was spared. She would seek help from Roger Williams, founder of the religiously tolerant colony of Rhode Island, and eventually die in a scuffle with a local Native American Indian group.
For a final example of a woman preacher who commanded a large following, and who again faced significant barriers due solely to her gender: Jarena Lee. Jarena Lee is hugely significant for a few reasons. She was a free black woman living in what would become the Philadelphia-Wilmington metropolitan area, specifically South Jersey. She was also the first woman ordained to preach in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, itself the first independent Black denomination in the United States and a towering figure in Black American and the wider American history. Lee was converted by the denomination's founder, Richard Allen, and fought vigorously for years to attain her official status as a preacher. Lee's spiritual autobiography is an excellent example of American conversion narratives and lays bare her significant self-education and intelligence. Indeed, it's the first autobiography of a black woman published in the US.
So, at least in the United States, and there are plenty more I didn't cover, there are women who are founding or commanding religious figures, but structural barriers to new religious movements and to female leadership at large make them few, far between, and largely marginal.
Sources:
Lee, Jarena. "The Life and Experience of Jarena Lee." In American Religions: A Documentary History, edited by R. Marie Griffith, 198-213. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Bacon, Margaret Hope. The Quiet Rebels: The Story of the Quakers in America. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1985.
Slavicek, Louise Chipley. “Anne Hutchinson.” Cobblestone 19, no. 6 (September 1998): 30.
Stein, Stephen J. The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.