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Women in Tolkien's books are like Hobbits in Middle-Earth: creatures of myth, that most people have never met. And when they do meet them, they're not particularly interested. Galadriel, Arwen, Luthien, Melian, all of them are mysterious creatures that might worship but never truly understand. The only exception (I think) is Eowyn, who is, for all dramatic purposes, a man.
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I think that's a bit strong: Let's not forget that Melian is actually a divine being, and if the others seem distant and reserved in LoTR, then it's probably because we only see them in their guise as members of society's elite (I think we can assume a similar view of emotional display to that of polite Edwardian society: that it should be saved for private moments). Perhaps also we're shown the elven women as the hobbits would see them: ethereal and timeless, creatures of wonder. Galadriel does let the mask slip briefly when Frodo offers her the Ring, but only for a fleeting moment and we never really know if she wants to decare herself "not the figure cut in alabaster" in reply to Gimli's flowery praise.
Eowyn perhaps seems more human to us because she shows more of herself, but Eowyn is quite young and impulsive, and she's human. To say that her dramatic role is that of a man is missing the point: her story couldn't happen to a man, because a young nobleman in a warrior society would be out riding against the enemy and taking a military role rather than dry-nursing an infirm king. Therefore a young man would neither want nor need to run off to war in disguise (nor would he be driven by unrequited love for an older man, I should hope).
To understand the reserve largely shown by the noble characters, you have to understand the huge division in British society at the turn of the last century between public and private life. Nowadays tabloid journalism and widespread overcrowding have made it increasingly futile to try to keep anything truly private, but in Tolkien's younger days it was expected that people of a certain class, women especially, would show emotional restraint in public, using more formal language and avoiding personal conversation, save of the most trivial sort. Such formality is rare now, but it shines out in Tolkien's work. He would probably regard intruding overly much into the private lives of his characters as vulgar and rude; in fact we only find out anything about the members of the Fellowship by long association over months of travel through hostile territory.
My view is that Tolkien, however much he yearned for earlier times, was a product of his own after all, and he couldn't help making his characters very reserved and stiff-upper-lipped, just as he himself was trained to be at boarding school. I postulate that, given this reserve, it would have been impossible to paint an intimate portrait of a woman using the narrative style of the book, which uses an observational point of reference that is seldom near them. Eowyn escapes from this emotional obscurity by being closer to the action than the others and therefore more open to the observer's eye. I don't regard the absence of women on the ring-quest as deliberate; it just wouldn't have seemed right to a man of his class to allow women to go into danger when men could go instead: it wouldn't be a gallant thing to do.