The whole issue of gender and Morris is rather complicated, and really not my field; but once the "pagan survival" fallacy is disposed of, it becomes just a question of custom and usage; purely a matter of choice for the people involved. Sharp wasn't really dogmatic about it; I think that he just wanted to reflect traditional practice, which leaned toward Morris as primarily a male pursuit; though it's a matter of record that women were sometimes involved, and were of course quite important in the continuance or revival after the Great War, when so many of the traditional dancers never came back; and those who did often no longer had the heart for it.

A useful, recent summary of Sharp's involvement with Morris is Roy Judge's Cecil Sharp and Morris 1906-1909, in The Folk Music Journal vol.8 no.2, 2002 (EFDSS, London); his relations with Mary Neal and the Espérance Club are gone into in some detail. To an extent, I suspect that the Ring and its insistence on Morris as an all-male tradition was in part a reaction against Neal (most of her dancers were women) and an attempt to return to what was seen as a more authentic approach; inevitably, Sharp was invoked as an authority for this, but he was safely out of the way by then. I don't know what his stance would have been had he still been living; neither, though, do his critics.

On the subject of Odinism, I recall reading an account -a year or two ago, I think- by a journalist who had attended a ceremony in which he was invoked. It was quite disturbing.