page_title: Freemasonry and women
section_title: Female Masons in "masculine only" Masonic bodies
hierarchical_section_title: Freemasonry and women / Female Masons in "masculine only" Masonic bodies
caption_attribution_description: English: Elizabeth Aldworth (1693-1773)
context_page_description: Freemasonry and women have a complex relationship, which can be readily divided into many phases with no demonstrable relationship to each other until the 20th century. A few women were involved in Freemasonry before the 18th century; however the first printed constitutions of the Premier Grand Lodge of England appeared to bar them from the Craft forever.
  The French Lodges of Adoption which spread through Continental Europe during the second half of the 18th century admitted Masons and their female relatives to a system of degrees parallel, but unrelated to the original rite. After eclipse in the 19th century, they were revived as women-only lodges in the 20th, and these later adopted the male degrees to give rise to French women's Masonry in the 1950s.
  18th-century British lodges and their American offshoots remained male only. In the late 1800s, rites similar to adoption emerged in the United States, allowing masons and their female relatives to participate in ritual together. These bodies, however, were more careful to discriminate between the mixed ritual and the genuine Freemasonry of the men.
context_section_description: There have been a few reported cases of a woman joining a "masculine only" masonic lodge.  These cases are exceptions and are debated by masonic historians.
caption: Elizabeth Aldworth in Masonic regalia, from a mezzotint of 1811
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