Ritual , Secrecy , and Civil Society - Volume 1 - Issue 2 - Winter 2013-2014
Princesses of the Blood and Sisters in Masonry : The Duchesse de Chartres , the Duchesse de Bourbon and the Princesse de Lamballe .
Janet Burke
One critical issue in the study of
women in freemasonry , within the broader context of the masonic movement , concerns the matter of motivation . For centuries , historians of masonry looked on the mixed-gender lodges of adoption as institutions not relevant to the masonic world . They often classified the women who joined as empty-headed and profligate , indulging themselves with meaningless pseudo-masonic ceremonies to alleviate their boredom ; they saw the men who created and joined these lodges of adoption and sponsored women for membership as doing so primarily to mollify demanding women . But the question these historians of masonry were not asking , the essential question within the context of the social and intellectual history of women , is what meaning the organization had for the women who became members . Why did they join ? How did the existence of the organization change their sense of themselves and their aspirations ? Given the secrecy of the organization and the paucity of first-person accounts , formulating the answer to that question is vexing . The existing documents do provide hints and windows , however . This paper will propose an answer to the question by looking briefly at membership patterns and motivations for affiliation as well as some of the rituals . It will touch upon small town and provincial lodges , lodges in cities with a parlement , military lodges , and the glittering lodges of Paris ; but it will focus primarily on the three princesses of the blood , the Duchess de Bourbon , the Princess de Lamballe and the Duchess de Chartres , taking into account what their contemporaries said about them , what they said about themselves , and the features of their personalities and personal histories that seem most to explain their reasons for becoming active in lodges of adoption , even taking the highest leadership positions within the organization .
Women freemasons were clearly of the elite . For the most part they were noblewomen , with a few coming from the ranks of the wealthy bourgeoisie . Although the actual circumstances surrounding the formation of the earliest lodges of adoption , probably in the 1740s , are sketchy , by the late 1770s , women ’ s masonry had clearly taken on its own life and significance . 1 The critical interpretive points here are that the lodges and ceremonies were meaningful to the women who were members , the lodges of adoption were of importance to the men who sponsored and joined them , and the lodges provided a space where , behind closed doors , women could and did develop an incipient feminism . This must be the framework within which scholars approach these organizations , not the framework within which one simply and solely com-
1 Margaret Jacob , reviewing archives recently returned to the Grand Orient de France from Russia , discovered that members of the Masonic lodge at Bordeaux were showing signs of skepticism about lodges of adoption as early as the 1740s . Before , the earliest known lodge with women members was in the early 1750s .
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