Women and Freemasonry: Inclusion, Co-Masonry, and Related Orders
Freemasonry's relationship with women is more layered than a simple yes-or-no answer suggests. Mainstream Anglo-American lodges have historically restricted membership to men, but parallel traditions — some nearly as old as the objection itself — have conferred full Masonic degrees on women for well over a century. This page maps those traditions, the organizations that practice them, and the structural distinctions that matter when comparing one body to another.
Definition and Scope
The phrase "women and Freemasonry" covers at least three distinct categories that are often collapsed into one conversation when they deserve separate treatment.
The first is co-Masonry (also spelled co-Freemasonry), in which men and women work side by side through the same ritual degrees in the same lodges. The second is female-only Masonry, practiced in lodges that admit only women but work the same three degrees as traditional Blue Lodge Masonry. The third is affiliated orders — bodies like the Order of the Eastern Star or the Order of the Amaranth — that are Masonically connected but constitute their own ritual systems, not conferred Freemasonry proper.
The distinction matters because recognition matters. The United Grand Lodge of England and most mainstream grand lodges in the United States do not recognize co-Masonic or female-only grand lodges as regular. That non-recognition does not erase the legitimacy those bodies claim on their own terms — it simply means a man initiated in a co-Masonic lodge cannot walk into a mainstream American lodge and be acknowledged as a brother. For a fuller picture of how recognition works within mainstream structures, the grand lodge system page covers that architecture in detail.
How It Works
Co-Masonry in the English-speaking world traces most directly to Le Droit Humain, an international order founded in France in 1893 that initiated its first woman, Maria Deraismes, that same year. Le Droit Humain works all three craft degrees plus higher degrees, admits both sexes on equal footing, and operates in roughly 60 countries through a federated structure. The American Federation of Human Rights is its U.S. affiliate.
Female-only Masonry operates on a parallel track. In England, two grand lodges — the Order of Women Freemasons and HFAF (Honourable Fraternity of Ancient Freemasons) — each work the full craft ritual and higher degrees exclusively for women. Both were founded in the early 20th century, with HFAF's origins dating to 1902.
The affiliated orders work differently:
- Order of the Eastern Star — open to women who are related to a Master Mason in good standing, and to Master Masons themselves. It confers five degrees based on Old Testament heroines and the New Testament figure of Adah. Membership in the U.S. historically has numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
- Order of the Amaranth — requires an Eastern Star affiliation for women petitioners; works a single court degree with a chivalric flavor.
- Order of the White Shrine of Jerusalem — a Christian-requirement appendant body open to Master Masons and their female relatives.
- Daughters of the Nile — linked to the Shriners (formally the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, now Shriners International); open to female relatives of Shrine members.
- Job's Daughters and Rainbow Girls — youth organizations for girls with Masonic family connections, not conferring Masonic degrees but carrying ritual and moral instruction.
None of the affiliated orders in category three confer the entered apprentice, fellowcraft, or master mason degrees. A woman who joins the Eastern Star has not been "made a Mason" in any technical sense, however warmly connected to the Masonic world she may be.
Common Scenarios
The question comes up in predictable patterns. A woman with deep family roots in Freemasonry — a father, grandfather, or husband who was or is an active Mason — often learns about the Eastern Star first, sometimes decades before discovering that co-Masonic or female-only lodges exist. That discovery can be genuinely surprising; the existence of bodies like Le Droit Humain rarely appears in mainstream lodge education.
A man initiated through a co-Masonic lodge who later joins a mainstream lodge will typically find his prior degrees unrecognized and be required to start from the entered apprentice degree again, as though uninitiated. This is not a judgment on the quality of the earlier work — it is a consequence of how regularity and recognition function as credentialing systems.
Researchers and visitors from European jurisdictions sometimes arrive in American lodges with exposure to female-friendly Masonic environments, since recognition norms vary more in continental Europe than in Anglo-American grand lodge systems.
Decision Boundaries
The operative question for anyone navigating this landscape is: what kind of membership is being sought, and with what recognition expectations?
| Situation | Relevant Structure |
|---|---|
| Woman seeking full craft degrees with male colleagues | Co-Masonic body (e.g., Le Droit Humain) |
| Woman seeking full craft degrees in a women-only environment | Female grand lodge (e.g., Order of Women Freemasons) |
| Woman with Masonic family connection seeking affiliated ritual | Order of the Eastern Star or similar |
| Man seeking recognition in mainstream U.S. lodges | Must petition a UGLE-recognized grand lodge |
Recognition is the hinge. The freeandacceptedmason.com home page situates the broader Masonic world and its structures — a useful anchor when the landscape of lodges, appendant bodies, and parallel orders starts to feel like an org chart without a legend.
What none of these structures should be confused with is purely social membership. Co-Masonic and female grand lodges work the same ritual degrees — the masonic ritual explained page describes what that means in practice — with the same expectation of memorization, ceremony, and obligation that mainstream lodges require of men.