Freemasonry: A Very Short Introduction - Andreas Önnerfors 2017

Brotherhood challenged

From its outset, freemasonry was and still is perceived as a distinctly male form of sociability. However, criticism of its exclusion of women began early on and led to the establishment of female or mixed para-masonic orders and eventually to entirely female offshoots of mainstream freemasonry.

Medieval craft regulations allowed unmarried women to exercise trade on their own under the legal status of ’femme sole’. As a rule, this right was extended to widows of master craftsmen. Thus, it is possible to find women in building trades such as (free)masonry throughout history. In The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), a literary work by medieval author Christine de Pizane, women are depicted as actively engaged in masonry and in a host of other crafts. Pizane also introduced in her writings the figure of the Queen of Sheba or Balkis as a very positive intellectual female role model.

The exclusion of women from modern freemasonry was an invention of the 1723 publication, The Constitutions, which fuelled suspicions that masonic lodges were hotbeds of sodomy, a theme that has endured in anti-masonic lore ever since. Partly because of such external accusations, freemasonry developed strict rules for behaviour and did not hesitate to expel members who (potentially) brought lodges into disrepute. Freemasonry promoted and simultaneously limited the ideal of male friendship. Regarding religion, The Constitutions forbid atheism and agnosticism. The term ’irreligious libertine’ is used to refer to atheism, a term that of course also has a carnal connotation—so that it simultaneously indicates the boundaries of religious (non-)belief and of proper sexual conduct. During the first two decades of freemasonry, the critique against its exclusion of women was mainly brought forward in articles and pamphlets. The first signs of real female participation occurred during the 1740s, other than some earlier exceptional cases. It was at this later point that the first female and mixed orders were created, modelled on the ritual pattern of regular freemasonry to form the first masonic ’lodges of adoption’, as they were called. During the last decades of the 18th century, female freemasonry was being practised all over Europe.

The Enlightenment argued for both sexes to be treated similarly, based on the argument of shared universal rationality, a perspective that effectively led to a slowly increasing group of privileged women entering this associational world of men. A regression then occurred during the Romanticism era, when biological arguments of essential gender differences led to a stronger division between the sexes; consequently, female masonic affiliation levels dropped. However, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, in the generation that eventually brought women’s suffrage and legal equality, a new surge of interest for female freemasonry manifested itself, also furthered by a re-evaluation of gender relations in certain strands of Western esotericism. In the century since then, feminism and ideas of gender equality have revived female participation in masonic lodges across the globe.