Full Description
A Civil Society explores the struggle to initiate women as full participants in the masonic brotherhood that shared in the rise of France's civil society and its "civic morality" on behalf of women's rights. As a vital component of the third sector during France's modernization, freemasonry empowered women in complex social networks, contributing to a more liberal republic, a more open society, and a more engaged public culture.
James Smith Allen shows that although women initially met with stiff resistance, their induction into the brotherhood was a significant step in the development of French civil society, including the promotion of women's rights in the late nineteenth century. Pulling together the many gendered facets of masonry, Allen draws from periodicals, memoirs, and archival material to account for the rise of women within the masonic brotherhood in the context of rapid historical change. Thanks to women's social networks and their attendant social capital, masonry came to play a leading role in French civil society and the rethinking of gender relations in the public sphere.
Contents
List of Figures
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
List of French Masonic Orders / Obediences
Introduction: French Women in Public Space
Freemasonry Writ Large
How Else Civil Society - and Freemason Women - Matter
Chapter 1: Masonry's Gendered Variations Before and After 1789
The Eighteenth Century's Mixed Orders and Adoption Lodges
Freemason Women's Social Networks in the Old Regime
Revolution: The Communities of Freemason Women Transformed
Chapter 2: The Craft's Long March to Mixed Orders, 1799-1901
Variations on Mixed Orders and Adoption Lodges
Freemason Women's Changing Social Networks in the Nineteenth Century
Revolution(s): The Successive Redefinitions of Women's Masonic Communities
Chapter 3: Women's Freemasonry and the Women's Movement, 1901-1944
Renewed Mixed Orders and Adoption Lodges at Home and Abroad
The Feminist Networks of Freemason Women
The Communities of Freemason Women During Two World Wars
Chapter 4: Contestatory Imaginaries: The Representations of Freemason Women
Serafina, Comtesse de Cagliostro
Pamina and Balkis
Consuelo, Comtesse de Rudolstadt
Diana Vaughan and Others
Conclusion: Civic Morality in Modern France
Themes
Between Theory and History
A Social Conscience
Appendices
Endnotes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
