The Lady in the Clock:

A Gentle Craft, Gender, and Change

PAUL RICH

GUILLERMO DE LOS REYES

One virtue of studying Masonic history is the realization or consulation the exercise brings that Freemasonry has never been insulated from changes going on in the world outside the lodge room. Today the Craft faces increased scrutiny as an exclusively male organization. Gender issues are more and more debated as human rights push to the top of the political agenda. And voluntary and nongovernmental associations are getting increased attention as part of the political process: "In the world of ideas, civil society is hot. It is almost impossible to read an article on foreign or domestic politics without coming across some mention of the concept...At the heart of the concept of civil society lie 'intermediate institutions', private groups that thrive between the realm of the state and the family."

It would seem inevitable that if voluntary organizations are seen as an important part of the democratic and civil process, they cannot be exempted from trends in the public arena. They cannot claim to be relevant to today and yet exempt from today's opinions. However, there has been little discussion despite this revival of the effect of these trends on that the oldest of voluntary international societies, the Freemasons. The purpose of this paper is to call attention to the need to discuss Freemasonry in the context of the new interest in civil society and to discuss the place of women in Freemasonry in the light of the enormously increased attention not only to civil society but to gender issues.

The generally held opinion, inside and outside of the Craft, is that Freemasonry is an adamantly male institution, but historically that is arguable. Those who claim, to the intense irritation of some Masons, that women were involved in the very beginnings of Masonry have some (albeit controversial) evidence to sustain their position. There is for example a record from 1408 where newly initiated Masons swore to obey "the Master, or Dame, or any other ruling Freemason". In the records of the Lodge of Mary's Chapel in Edinburgh, dated 1683, the lodge was actually presided over by a Dame or Mistress. The records of the Grand Lodge of York in 1693 speak about male and female initiates.

Admittedly, by the eighteenth century the anecdotes about women Masons take on a decidedly different tone. They are now are interlopers who become Masons by accident and are made members to protect the secrets. A woman who found out the secrets by spying was initiated in a lodge in the English town of Barking in 1714. Another woman who eavesdropped on a lodge ceremony, the Hon. Mrs. Elizabeth Aldworth - the celebrated or infamous daughter of the first Viscount Doneraile - was initiated in 1712 when she was discovered eavesdropping, and the fact is recorded on her tombstone.

There are a number of other ladies in eighteenth-century England who overheard Masonic secrets, hiding in clocks and cupboards, and when found out were initiated. One of them, of Newcastle on Tyne, actually later advertised in the press her willingness to tell the secrets to anyone for a price! Nor were female Freemasons confined to England: in Canada in 1783 a woman who eavesdropped was initiaed in 1783, buried under a tombstone with Masonic symbols, and proudly claimed as an ancestor by a later Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of New Brunswick in 1954.

But, in addition to these interesting stories about women in the late Middle Ages becoming Masons or of curious women being initiated after being rousted out of grandfathers' (or perhaps grandmothers') clocks, there have as we all know long long been Masonic-related organizations involving women. They are international in scope and their role, as well indeed of the role of women in what have been regarded as men's secret societies, needs examination in the years ahead. The better known women's groups with Masonic connections include the Order of the Eastern Star, the Rainbow, and the Amaranth, but there are many more.

There are also exclusively women's lodges which work the full Masonic ritual and do not admit men, as well as co-Masonic lodges which admit both men and women. In many cases the male Mason's reception of female Masons is considerably less cordial than the attitude displayed towards orders like the Eastern Star which do not claim to be working the Masonic rituals. Addressing a group of women, an extremely distinguished English Freemason remarked: "When we talk about Women and Freemasonry in Britain we are compelled to discuss the two Orders firmly established here, both claiming that they use the same ritual as their husbands. They wear the same Masonic clothing, and even go so far in copying us that they call each other 'Brother'. Inevitably, they are taboo."

One is tempted to ask "Taboo to whom?" In any event, whether the organizations are secret societies catering to women which have a Masonic connection but do not profess to reveal Masonic secrets, or those which actually confer the Masonic rites on women, attention to these movements involves both the issues of democratization and gender. Research into them is particularly appropriate because there have been changes in society which virtually demand that more attention be paid to thse issues by responsible Masons.

Central to the discussion is Francis Fukuyama's book Trust, not because it is an immortal work but because he has the apparent ability to sense what is going to be the issue of the hour. Every Masonic leader should read this volume. Contributing to the upsurge in interest in voluntary organizations, he has advanced a new or revived thesis about how what he calls intermediate institutions sustain democracy. His work is indicative of the heightened appreciation of private associations which that famous early visitor to the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville, considered so important to democracy.

So associations and volunteerism have become catch words and the scholar's interest in nongovernmental organizations like Masonry seems likely to increase, getting more attention in particular from political scientists partly as a consequence of the end of the Cold War: "The renewed interest in civil society first emerged in Eastern Europe after communism crumbled. Leaders like Vaclav Havel wanted to go beyond establishing new governments and create a culture that could sustain political and economic liberalism. They looked for help to those private groups beyond the reach of the state - citizens' associations, churches, human-rights chapters, jazz clubs - that had nourished dissident life. Around the same time, the victorious Western democracies found themselves confronting sagging economies, a fraying social fabric and the loss of national purpose. Here too, the experts and statesmen agreed, revitalizing civil society would overcome our malaise."

The demand that scholars focus more on the components of the informal governmental process has revived political culture. A political culture approach to issues places in perspective the more ideologically-bound discussions that sometimes characterized scholarship during the Iron Curtain era; the relevance of movement slike Masonry to society is enhanced by the discussion which Fukuyama promotes.

Clearly there is something to the idea that democracy and voluntary associations are linked, as is responsibility and society. Writes Stephen Bailey, "...even with the twentieth-century's massive depreciation of Victorian rhetoric, millions of people have continued to find nourishment for the free self in fulfilling perceived obligations and in performing voluntary services. I remember my father donning his greatcoat on a blustery night of snow and wind preparing for a mile walk and saying, 'I do not want to go to the meeting of the prudential committee of the church, but I ought to go!' Upon returning, he would smile and say simply, 'Well, I have done my duty.' "

This renewed interest in the contribution of associations to the wellbeing of society is not confined to the United States. The expansion of voluntary organizations in Latin America is reflected in the fact that a recent guide to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the region cites 42 directories containing information about more than 20,000 groups, a doubling since 1990. These societies and their influence on the democratization of Latin America are evidence for the arguments about over civil culture encouraged by Fukuyama:

...the book could mark a turning point in the way we look at ourselves, usefully erasing the phony wall that has grown up between economics (which is hard and scientific) and culture (which is soft and studied often by men with beards). Mr. Fukuyama is also presenting a profound challenge to those who talk about a borderless world and to those who try to graft neat social programs they find in, say, Germany, onto American culture. There are such things as national cultures and just because we can't precisely define them doesn't mean they are not important. In the 20th century we tried to reduce social policy to a science. Now we are discovering that many of the important things can't be captured by numbers, even in economics. Mr. Fukuyama is leading this revival.

With respect to those who think the increase in voluntary societies in countries which are struggling to democratize is noteworthy, the basic claim is that, "A striking upsurge is under way around the globe in organized voluntary activity and the creation of private, nonprofit or non-governmental organizations." The assertion is made that this constitutes a second or parallel world of large numbers of networks of people. In Foreign Affairs, Lester Salamon has criticized "the myth of the immaculate conception", i.e. the idea this is a new phenomenon: "While recent years have witnessed a dramatic upsurge in organized voluntary activity, such activity has deep historical roots in virtually every part of the world." He warns that "Careful efforts must thus be made to acknowledge the nonprofit sector's peculiar historical roots...", and concludes that, "The resulting surge of interest in nonprofit organizations has opened the gates to vast reservoirs of human talent and energy, even while it has created dangers of stalemate and dispute. While it is far from clear what must be done to keep these gates open, a crucial first step is a better understanding of the dramatic process underway and the immense new challenges it represents."

While the United States is not alone in the plentitude of its volunteerism, its nonprofit sector is especially vigorous in comparison with other countries. Still, an estimated 40,000 new private organizations were created in France in one year (1986). In the case of Britain, France and Holland, "As nonprofit organizations step up their activism and lobbying, the governments will increasingly have to contend with groups that, like their American counterparts, take responsibility for influencing public policy, hold governments at all levels more accountable, and mount advocacy campaigns."

The worldwide significance of the discussion is apparent when Fukuyama claims that those nations where social trust prevails will prosper far more than those where such trust is lacking. This social trust is largely manufactured by the voluntary societies that create civil society. In respects, Fukuyama is a modern-day de Tocqueville, a cicerone who like him appreciates the importance of non-government groups. De Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America:

In the United States, political associations are only one small part of the immense number of different types of associations found there. Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types - religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute...In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.

The consequences of not having durable intermediate associations that stand between the family and state are - in Fukuyama's view - devastating. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe where civil society was destroyed provide a prime example. However, the lack of volunteerism is not confined to former Communists states: "Many Latin Catholic countries like France, Spain, Italy and a number of nations in Latin America exhibit a saddle-shaped distribution of organizations, with strong families, a strong state, and relatively little in between. These societies are utterly different from socialist ones in any number of important ways, particularly with regard to their greater respect for the family. But, like socialist societies, there has been in certain Latin Catholic countries a relative deficit of intermediate social groups in the area between the family and large, centralized organizations like the church or the state."

This 'discovery' of the role of voluntary groups has been anticipated - for instance by the work of Margaret Jacob of the University of Pennsylvania in studying the influence of eighteenth-century Masonic lodges. It seems appropriate to this discussion that the principal living historian of European Freemasonry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a woman. Jacob argues that, "Modern civil society was invented during the Enlightenment, in the new enclaves of sociability of which freemasonry was the most avowedly constitutional and aggressively civic. The nature of masonic sociability has not been understood because historians have seldom looked at actual masonic practices." She believes that, "In the final analysis freemasonry, for all of its exclusivity, secrecy, and gender bias, transmitted and textured the Enlightenment, translated all the cultural vocabularies of its members into a shared and common experience that was civil and hence political."

So, as she indicates, the influence of voluntary organizations on political life and on gender issues needs to be thoroughly examined and it is crucial that Masons be able to contribute to the debate rather than sit on the sidelines. Perhaps, as some suggest, voluntary associations are a mainstay of democracy. But that is not always obvious or universal. Ironically, in the Latin American situation the contributions of such voluntary groups as are obviously powerful, good examples being Freemasonry and Opus Dei, are difficult to credit with the creation of the open society. Their activities do not support the Fukuyama thesis about an intermediate zone of voluntary societies between family and state that promote democracy, whatever the effects of other groups. Study of volunteerism's efficacy is obviously going to be on a group-by-group and country-by-country basis.

Having made the case for the study of the place of voluntary associations, one has to ask about the involvement of women in these movements. Unquestionably Freemasonry and kindred societies played a major role in the life of the American male. But how about women and Freemasonry in a modern context, and not just concealed in clocks?

Mainstream Masons in the last two centuries have been resolute in keeping women out of the lodge, often treating them as lamiae. Masonry was interpreted - or, in our opinion, reinterpreted - as masculinity par excellence. This was apparent even in the lodge furniture. Studying Masonic lodge rooms, William D. Moore writes:

...while traditional social structures were attacked by liberal theology and the changes wrought by industrial capitalism, the Masonic lodge room through its use of furnishings and ritual continued to express order and masculinity in an understandable manner. As corporate identity fell in the surrounding culture, lodge furnishings continued to emphasize the site where members were obligated. The lodge room then can be understood as a place in which masculine values which were disappearing in the outside world were preserved. It was a theater in which millions of American men entertained each other by acting out morality plays, and a hallowed space where the same men found spiritual meaning and perpetuated what they unconsciously recognized as a disappearing social order.

However, Masonry has never been quite so completely the redoubt of male chauvinism that some of its critics claim. For real red-meat male chauvinism, one must look at the work of a popular contemporary writer such as Robert Bly, who writes, "There is male initiation, female initiation, and human initiation....We have defective mythologies that ignore masculine depth of feeling, assign men a place in the sky instead of earth, teach obedience to the wrong powers, work to keep men boys, and entangle both men and women in systems of industrial domination that exclude both matriarchy and patriarchy."

Not everyone would agree with Bly that what the world needs is to free the male ego through uninhibated ho-ho-ho old boy initiation ceremonies. Mary Ingham in her book Men: The Male Myth Exposed, thinks that the male search for risk "stems largely from insecurity, the need to try and prove that they are male and that they are strong, because they lack the inner ego strength to feel it." As far as she is concerned, the end result is to "add another layer of insensitivity". In her view, "one of the most hopeful signs of the times is a father's recent description of holding his child for the first time: 'It felt fantastic - the closest to being female.' " She adds that men, "...have got to shatter the myth of masculinity which stifles their expression of their real needs."

Bly asserts that American salvation is via male ritual, that "The ancient practice of initiation then - still very much alive in our genetic structure - offers a third way through, between the two 'natural' roads of manic excitement and victim excitement. A mentor or 'male mother' enters the landscape. Behind him, a being of impersonal intensity stands, which in our story is the Wild Man, or Iron John." Much nonsense like this is being written today about male initiation and bonding. In The New York Times, Professor Hal Foster of Cornell University has described this development as "celebration of the masochistic man" and relates it to the growth of "the cult of abjection" with an oscillation between sensitivity and sadism, adding "God save the women who get caught in between."

It does seem that a corollary to the new male ritualism is more than a few cases is a viciously reactionary male chavinism that would see that women are again relegated to the kitchen, de facto deprived of their civil rights. Those who think gender has become an obvious civil right sissue will be surprised to learn how, once again, at least according to Martin Green in The Adventurous Male (1993), "politics is a male group phenomenon" and that "Seymour Lipset's Political Man naturally deals with men and not with women". The authors know Dr. Lipset, a friend, and hasten to add that he is not a chauvinist, whatever Mr. Green is.

There are a few scholars who have a distinct feeling of déjà vu about male initiation. They are in a hardy little clan who have been interested in American fraternal organizations. One of the best is, like Margaret Jacob, a woman: Lynn Dumenil, who wrote Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880-1930 (1984). Those who do study secret ritualistic societies have often felt the subject has not been taken seriously enough by mainstream academia, and possibly that situation is now going to change.

A point which needs emphasis is that while fraternal lodges were certainly involved in male initiation and male bonding, they have also involved women. Moreover, the Masons see their rites as opening the door to philosophic and intellectual knowledge, teachings which contrast with the primeval male knowledge that Bly wishes to impart. His successful initiate "increases his tolerance for ashes, eats dust as snakes do, increases his stomach for terrifying insights, deepens his ability to digest the evil facts of history, accepts the job of working seven years under the ground, leaves the granary at will through the rat's hole, bites on cinders, learns to shudder, and follows the voice of the old mole below the ground."

While mainstream Masonry remains a male organization, Masonry is not an expression of a rude and crude male chavinism as so many of the male movements are. In contrast to such soapboxing, Freemasonry displays considerable evidence of its Enlightenment roots, and its rituals are far removed from the "dust and flesh" which Bly invokes. In the initiation there are injunctions to temperance and prudence, along with the imparting of considerable esoteric knowledge. When that is considered in conjunction with the usually elaborate lodge room where the degree is communicated, and the fact that the officers often are in formal dress, one sees that there is considerable difference in sophistication between the Masonic and Iron John notions of initiations and the knowledge that they should impart. We must make strenuous efforts as Masons to distance ourselves from some of the current "male power" groups, and to demonstrate to the increasingly highly-educated young men from whom we hope to draw our members that we have a serious side. In this connection, the bold decision of the Grand Lodge of California to construct a highly visible addition to its Nob Hill building in San Francisco showcasing its library is exemplary and farsighted.

On the other hand, alongside the aspects of Masonry which show it is not an organizaiton of cave men, thre is a male tradition for which one need not apologize. A renewed interest in having some separate activities for men and women should not be the same as the revival of male, or for that matter, female chauvinism.

One is tempted to suggest that there may be a revival of interest in the fraternal orders that became so important in Victorian times, and that will include an interest in women's fraternalism. By far the most important of any of these organizations, either for men or women, is Freemasonry. In the United States no other fraternity approaches it in size and assets, or in opportunities.

Generally the fraternal orders have been maligned as a lost cause. That may prove to have been a premature verdict. For example, Bly quite rightly states that "Thousands and thousands of women, being single parents, are raising boys with no adult man in the house." In his talks to groups of women he finds that "Women who were raising sons alone were extremely alert to the dangers of no male model. One woman declared that she realized about the time her son got to high-school age that he needed more hardness than she could naturally give. But, she said, if she made herself harder to meet that need, she would lose touch with her own femininity." What he should have added was that significant numbers of men have become single parents. In both cases, the suggestion that the fraternal orders might play a part in providing the missing parent has merit.

If people around the world do feel a lack of ritual in their lives as traditions die, particularly a lack of initiatory ritual to mark the transition into adulthood, the use of existing systems would be preferable to the mentorship of the Wild Man. If the description of Masonry as the Gentle Craft sometimes seems a trifle unctious, it does point towards a basic truth about the movement, which is that it is not what the public popularly thinks a fraternity is. Whether the gender questions facing the Craft are answered by lodges opening their doors to women or by a compromise by which co-Masonry achieves recognition, or some other alternative, Masons should be mindful of the fact that:

In a society that is looking for alternatives to a way of life dominated by corporations and state, social movements suggest other choices. A network of organizations that encompass broad constituencies can change our understanding of what is possible and desirable. Little by little we can build a new political culture based on our own questions about the existing order. Meeting human needs neglected by the state and the market is the basis for social movements. By working together they promote positive change and stretch our understanding of democracy and justice. The values of the everyday world, including friendship, respect and concern for others, combined with shared hopes and aspirations, and healthy does of courage and patience, characterize what is best about the culture of social movements.

The game isn't over. Contrary to the claims of Professor Robert Putnam of Harvard, who argues that civic life is collapsing and has popularized the phrase "bowling alone", volunteerism remains a strong force in American life. An estimated seventy percent of the American population belong to at least one association and twenty-five percent belong to at least four. "I came to know hundreds of people who found meaning and satisfaction in performing community services," wrote Stephen Bailey about his years of residence in Middletown, Connecticut: "...volunteer firemen, members of library boards, organizers of community chests and United Fund drives, hospital aides, readers for the blind. These activities were frequently in addition to service on PTA committees or church boards and participation in service-club benefits for the crippled....no reform of the bureaucratic and political system can possibly obviate the need for the intimate expressions of caring that are associated with the voluntary performance of works of obligation and service."

That America's initially national societies in many cases have become international is itself good. Countries which have lacked volunteerism are acquiring it. This is true in Latin America. New organizations are taking the place of close communities and normative systems. This bring to mind de Tocqueville's words, "Among laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads."

We have asserted that the new debate about volunteerism inevitably will focus more attention on Masonry's position on gender issues. Our research lodges have a significant part to play in making such debate constructive and useful. The attention being given to the role of nongovernmental organizations, including those for women, should be welcomed by our lodges if they have an appreciation of the complexity of the history of women and Masonry. The discussion is not as threatening as it may seem when it is put into historical perspective.

There can be a legitimate case for organizations which include in their purposes exclusively male and female rites of passage and ritual celebration. The fact that millions of women join women-only organizations that are partly based on ritual in indicative of a need, just as there is a need for male groups that use ritual.

What will not be helpful is to treat all these issues in a negative, sarcastic, or bigoted fashion. Freemasonry has changed greatly over the centuries and it undoubteldy will change over the ensuing centuries. Now more than ever we need to know our history, to be imaginative about our alternatives, and to examine the posibilities.

Social problems in the United States indicate that society needs to look at past experience for help, and it might be that rather than re-inventing the wheel, that those fraternal orders to which grandfather and grandmother belonged could be useful in the new world order, if a pun is permitted. The lady has climbed out of the clock and we have to deal with that. Our critics need to know more about us, and we need to know more about ourselves.

Dr. and Bro.Paul Rich is a member of St. John's Lodge in Boston. He is Titular Professor of International Relations and History at the University of the Americas, Puebla, Mexico, and Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University. He is the author or editor of more than thirty-five books.

Guillermo De Los Reyes is professor at the University of the Americas and currently a teaching fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. He is collaborating with Dr. Rich on a history of Freemasonry in Mexico.