Women Freemasons and feminist causes 1908-1935 : the case of the Honourable Fraternity of Antient Masonry.

An important but hitherto unstudied aspect of the women's movement in Britain
between 1900 and 1935 was the appearance of organisations of Freemasons which
admitted women. This thesis is a case study of one such body, the Honourable
Fraternity of Antient Masonry (HFAM). The roots of women's Freemasonry reach
back to the eighteenth-century French Lodges of Adoption. In 1902, the social
reformer and Theosophist Annie Besant established a lodge of the French-based
International Order of Co-Freemasonry, Le Droit Humain, in London. In 1908, the
clergyman William Cobb led a secession from Besant's Order and created the
HFAM, which under the charismatic leadership of Cobb and his successor Marion
Halsey, became the largest British Masonic Order admitting women.
An analysis of HFAM's social composition shows the dominance of aristocratic
women during the period before 1914 and illustrates the functioning of social
networks in support of the women's movement. HFAM mobilised these networks
to support the campaign for women's suffrage. An innovative social experiment by
the HFAM was the establishment in 1916 of the Halsey Training College to train
secondary school teachers. With the expansion of the social basis of HFAM's
membership after the First World War, HFAM's organisation of its philanthropic
activities changed with the establishment of its Bureau of Service. This smaller-scale
but more diverse social programme undertook effective work at a local level but
ultimately proved unsustainable. The HFAM illustrates many structural issues of the
women's movement: the importance of quasi-religions such as Theosophy; the
leadership of aristocratic women; the importance of male support; and the effect of
a shift to more local activities and a wider middle class membership after the First
World War. In particular, the HFAM provides new perspectives on interpretations
of the idea of the complementarity of the sexes within the women's movement to
1935.