Freemason Feminists: Masonic Reform and the Women’S Movement in France, 1840-1914
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FREEMASON FEMINISTS: MASONIC REFORM AND THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IN FRANCE, 1840-1914 JAMES SMITH ALLEN In 1903 a Belgian author and activist living in Paris, Céline Renooz (see picture 3), was initiated into the mixed masonic lodge, ‘La Raison Triomphale’.1 The victim of a troubled marriage, Renooz was gener- ally suspicious of men’s motives, but not those of her newly found fraternal community. “I must say”, she wrote in her unpublished memoirs not long afterward, “I was deeply impressed by the generous offers of help, assistance, and fellowship made together by all of the lodge’s brothers”.2 For an impecunious widowed mother of four chil- dren who would all die of tuberculosis, this associational solicitude was most welcome. But Renooz’s principal interest in mixed Masonry was not material; it was primarily symbolic. In 1925, still living in deep poverty, Renooz published the third volume of L’Ere de vérité, her sweeping historical survey of Western matriarchy. She traced the mythological origins of Masonry in a new interpretation of the He- brew Bible, whose chief prophets and redactors, she alleged, were not men but women. In Renooz’s rich masonic imagination, Hiram Abiff, the illustrious architect of the Temple of Solomon, was actually a woman by the name of Marih, Hiram spelled backwards. According to Renooz, Freemasonry’s brotherhood of trust in keeping craft secrets had its Biblical origins in a woman’s not a man’s martyrdom. Ma- sonry was therefore founded on an historical error, she claimed, which 1 Allen 2000 116-151. The lodge ‘La Raison Triomphale’ was the sixth to join the Grande Loge Symbolique Ecossaise Mixte et Maintenue (GSLE II) in 1902 and was active until it disbanded in 1906. Little is known about this particular lodge or its adherents, other than that it belonged to the most liberal of the masonic obediences, which initiated men and women by the same rituals in the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite (Hivert-Messeca 1997, 260). Undoubtedly Renooz was attracted to Masonry generally, and not just the GLSE II, because of Freemasonry’s symbolic importance in the history of Western religion. Hence, Renooz’s tentative interest in La Nouvelle Jérusalem Adoption, under the aegis of the Grande Loge de France, in 1907, though she was never formally initiated according to her personal papers or according to the lodge’s records. Otherwise, an ardent feminist such as Renooz would not have been interested in a form of Masonry with special rituals for women only. My thanks to Jan Snoek for bringing Renooz’s interest in adoptive Masonry to my attention. 2 Renooz n.d., b. 18, d. 1903, f. 10r. 220 J.S. ALLEN only lodges in Le Droit Humain and some others in the Grande Loge Symbolique Ecossaise were committed to rectifying.3 Few Masons, much less Jews or Christians, would accept such a bizarre reading of Biblical scripture. But many others acknowledge the unusual role of women in French Freemasonry since its beginnings in the eighteenth century.4 Perhaps as early as the 1740s, women par- ticipated in the craft, albeit irregularly, until the Grand Orient de France officially tolerated the practice in special lodges of adoption in 1774. The Revolution of 1789 interrupted this activity; it resumed after Thermidor and flourished under the Napoleonic Empire. By then, however, the initiation of women into lodges had become primarily an occasion for elaborate banquets and balls. For much of the nineteenth century, women were feted in the special tenues blanches for Freema- sons’ families, including children. There was nothing necessarily ma- sonic about these rituals. Eventually activists in the Grande Loge Symbolique Ecossaise (GLSE) attempted to do something about the exclusion of women from the craft’s mysteries. In 1893 Maria Dera- ismes and Georges Martin established the mixed masonic order of Le Droit Humain, even though few Masons were willing to recognize it. For years Le Droit Humain would rival the break-away GLSE Mixte et Maintenue (hereafter GLSE II). Consequently, by the time Céline Renooz was initiated in the latter obedience, assertive individuals such as she, were transforming Freemasonry at the very height of the women’s movement in Third Republic France.5 This paper examines more closely the remarkable coincidence be- tween masonic reform and the women’s movement in France. The struggle to initiate women must be seen in the context of the struggle for women’s political rights, if only because so many feminists were active in mixed Masonry around 1900. The discussions of women’s initiation in the annual convents of the Grand Orient de France and the GLSE in the 1890s, following the renegade initiation of Maria Dera- ismes in Les Libres Penseurs lodge in 1882, manifested a greater awareness of women’s growing, though controversial, place in asso- ciations. As Philip Nord has argued in his book The Republican Mo- ment6, the early Third Republic represented a major turning point in the development of French civic life, a culture of collective action on 3 Renooz 1925 177-200. 4 Hivert-Messeca 1997; Jupeau-Réquillard 2000; Allen 2003. 5 Hause & Kenney 1984; Klejman & Rochefort 1989. 6 Nord 1995. .