The Origins of Freemasonry by Margaret C. Jacob

Author:Margaret C. Jacob [Jacob, Margaret C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812219883
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2007-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Women in the Lodges

Our attention must now focus on gender and French freemasonry in the century of light. The reason is simple: the eighteenth-century records for French lodges of both women and men are richer than anywhere else in Europe and America, at least as yet discovered. Of course, in the Anglo-American world female participation in lodges, as opposed to affiliates and auxiliaries like the nineteenth-century Eastern Star in America, was strictly prohibited. Gender exclusion now plagues contemporary freemasonry in both the United States and Great Britain, where numbers in the gender-segregated lodges continue to fall. So seriously do some contemporary American freemasons take the prohibition against women as sisters that when the Grand Master of France addressed his American brothers in the early 2000s he had to prove the legitimacy of the Grand Orient by asserting that it had never initiated women. It is sad, that the declaration had to be made, more sad for the historical record, that he obscured the reality of a vibrant freemasonry for French (and other) women from the eighteenth century until today.

Just about everything concerning freemasonry in France has been controversial in the era after World War II (and well before). Designated as contentious—as soon as it migrated from Britain into Catholic Europe in the 1730s—freemasonry was traditionally written about either by devotees of the order or by its critics—generally those on the Right.1 Had they but known that lodges could also act as places where women expressed their sense of themselves, even their sense of equality, then the hostility would probably have been even more intense.

Enlightened attitudes were sought and experienced by rank-and-file followers, generally from the professions, the military, and lesser aristocrats, who joined the French lodges in large numbers from the 1760s onward. They coveted improvement, intellectual stimulation, toleration, and confirmation for their achievements. Initially, the originally male lodges “adopted” women—to use masonic parlance—and gradually women joined what became known to both women and men as “lodges of adoption.” The process of gender integration appears to have been underway as early as the 1740s, and in 1745–46 we have the first concrete evidence from a women’s lodge working in Bordeaux. As the Bordeaux records tell us, the entrance of women into the lodges provoked controversy. For example, a clerical member of the Bordeaux lodge, the curé of Rions, “was condemned … for his extraordinary indiscretion … to have led women into the lodge … and for having said that he would voluntarily pay … 3 francs for making it possible for them to see the lodge.”2 He faced a three-month suspension. Whatever the priest’s motives and his relationships with women, the issue of women in freemasonry would not be easily resolved.

Women surfaced earlier in the life of bordelaise freemasonry than seems to have been the case at any other European site, as far as we know. A brother announced that women were holding their own lodge meetings in the town, and he called them “des Soeurs de l’Adoption.” This would not do, the lodge decided, and in its wisdom moved to prevent it.

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