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Reviewed by:
  • Women’s Agency and Rituals in Mixed and Female Masonic Orders
  • Amy Hale
Keywords

Freemasonry, co-masonry, Enlightenment, equality of the sexes, Annie Besant, Le Droit Humain

Alexandra Heidle and Jan A.M. Snoek, Editors. Women’s Agency and Rituals in Mixed and Female Masonic Orders. Leiden: Brill, 2008, Pp. xvi + 436.

The dominant popular (and sometimes academic) narrative of Freemasonry is that of a tightly maintained tradition, passed down from time immemorial, [End Page 227] by word of mouth, from man to man. However, the history of Freemasonry is rich and varied and the existence of women’s and mixed-gender lodges from the eighteenth century onward provides an alternative model of the ways in which Freemasonry as an institution has developed. As Jan Snoek notes in the preface, despite the conservative narratives within and surrounding Freemasonry, the traditions are actually dynamic and responsive to historical shifts, contexts, and localities. The language of “regular” and “irregular” is frequently used within Freemasonry to justify or legitimize particular branches; however, as Snoek rightly comments, in actuality there is no wrong Freemasonry, just unsuccessful Freemasonry, and throughout history there has been a lot of interesting Freemasonry that has included women. This book, edited by Alexandra Heidle and Jan Snoek demonstrates the interplay of the rise of speculative Freemasonry in the eighteenth century and the role of women in European society. We see here that, despite the attempts to limit Freemasonry to male practitioners, both women and men have resisted this exclusion with sometimes very interesting results, even if many of the experiments were relatively short-lived.

This collection contains ten essays by many of the luminaries within the fast-growing field of Freemasonic studies. Most essays focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but there are some forays into the Co-Masonry of twentieth-century Europe. The introductory essay by Jan Snoek is worthy of mention in that it provides a lucid history of the inclusion of women into Freemasonry in French, wider Continental, and British traditions, providing useful terms and timelines that greatly assist the reader with the essays to follow. The first essay, “The Relationships of Androgynous Secret Orders with Freemasonry: Documents on the Ordre des Hermites de Bonne Humeur in Sacshen-Gotha (1739–1791)” by Bärbel Raschke, addresses the ways in which noblewomen in eighteenth-century Sacshen-Gotha used a paramasonic order, the Order of the Happy Hermits, to increase their level of social and political engagement while also challenging the rise of Freemasonry as an exclusively male institution.

The second essay, “The Grand Lodge of Adoption” by Malcolm Davies, chronicles the short lifespan of the earliest mixed-gender Freemasonic lodge on record. It dovetails nicely with the third essay in the collection, “Maconnerie des Dames” from AndreasÖnnerfors, which provides detailed and exciting documentation regarding the proposed ritual system for a women’s order associated with the German Strict Observance. The degree to which this women’s order was actually realized is still unclear, but the organization, as evidenced by the extensive appendix, was quite well developed. [End Page 228]

James Smith Allen’s, “Freemason Feminists” looks at the ways in which Co-Masonic and mixed Masonic lodges became loci for feminist activity in France, driven by the liberalism and universalism of Masonic values. Also on a feminist topic, “The ‘Women’s Question’ ” by Anton van de Sande is a study of Dutch Masonic periodicals from the second half of the nineteenth century examining views on women’s rights and their relationship to inclusion into Dutch Freemasonry. This discussion was apparently preempted by the establishment of Co-Masonry in Amsterdam in 1904. The next contribution, Henrik Bodgan’s “Women and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,” provides a short introduction to the fairly well known story of the prominent women of the Golden Dawn and the ways in which the Golden Dawn system envisioned spiritual equality of the genders. Women’s full inclusion in this initiatory order is clearly significant to the subject matter of the book, yet more direct connections with the history and ritual of Freemasonry would have been quite useful.

Bernard Dat’s contribution, “Stretton’s Operative Masonry: Legacy or Forgery...

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