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.
The status of women within Medieval trades was largely dependent on the local interpretation of femme sole, the legal term for a single woman.
This was usually the widow of a tradesman, who was permitted to continue her husband's business after his death, and often established in the rights and privileges of his trade guild or company.
While a number of masonic historians have categorised this as a "misprint", Adolphus Frederick Alexander Woodford, who studied and catalogued these documents, considered it genuine.
[3] In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the status of women amongst masons in Britain is likely to be similar to that codified in the minutes of the lodge at St. Mary's Chapel in Edinburgh.
[4] As the Freemasonry of the Premier Grand Lodge of England spread in France, the French fraternity stayed within the letter of Anderson's proscription of women, but saw no reason to ban them from their banquets or their religious services.
In 1747, the Chevalier Beauchaine began the Order of Woodcutters (Ordre des Fendeurs), with rites supposedly based on an early version of the Carbonari.
[6] Final separation occurred in 1935, and in 1959 they adopted the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, embracing regular masonry as Grande Loge féminine de France.
[26][27] Lajos Abafi (Ludwig Aigner), the historian of Hungarian (and Austrian) Freemasonry in the 18th century, reports that in 1778 Márton Heinzeli, the head of the Eperjes (today Prešov in Slovakia) lodge named "Zurn tugendhaften Reisenden (Virtuous Traveler)", initiated three women as Freemasons.
According to Abafi, the case took place as follows: In 1779, it finally reached a point where neither lodge work nor Rosicrucian conventions could be held and chemical laboratories could not be subordinated.
These, however, stormed him with the award of further degrees, because they wanted to gradually found their own Women's Lodge, on condition that this would at least indirectly benefit the Rosicrucian Order, "because more ... and we could more easily hide among them", – Heinzeli promised to do his best in this regard.
1) The Generalate of the Order, however, prohibited – with full appreciation of the good intention – under threat of suspension or exclusion, the frequency of the women's lodge, 2) and thus this electrification plan had also become into water.
[28] German-born Marie-Henriette Heiniken was an adventurous woman, better known as "Madame de Xaintrailles," who disguised herself as a man in order to serve in the military during the Napoleonic Wars, earning her rank "at the point of the sword."
According to one account, she went to the Masonic Loge des Frères Artistes in Paris in hopes of joining the French Adoption Rite, a lodge specifically for women.
In her reasoning she brought up her knowledge of freemasonry, her legal status as a son (praefectio) and the absence of any mention of candidates' gender in the constitution of the Grand Orient.
In her childhood and youth, Julia lived with her parents and brother Demeter in Vienna and in the Esterhazy Castle in Cseklész, near Pozsony (today Pressburg, Bratislava).
Settling down in Vienna for about ten years with their five children, the couple lived the worriless life of the high society with balls, dances, masquerades and carriage ridings filling their days.
Julia Apraxin concluded a Russian orthodox marriage with Lorenzo Rubio Guillén y Montero de Espinosa (1835–1895), a Spanish cavalry captain in 1867.
Still living in Paris, on 28 March 1879, the couple gave a party in a stylish hotel in Madrid for the elite of the Spanish capital including the representatives of the worlds of politics, science, the police and literature.
Presumably, Julia met with the representatives of the "Fraternidad Iberica" Masonic lodge, allowing members of the Investigative Committee to prepare a recommendation of the countess.
In any case, on 14 June 1880, the first woman in Spain was initiated in a masculine lodge with great interest, about which the French Masonic newspaper Chaîne d’Union reported in detail.
Anderson herself denied that it was possible for a woman to be made a mason, but remained non-committal or downright enigmatic when questioned as to the origin of her extensive knowledge of Freemasonry.
She met and married Captain Andrew Anderson in the 1840s, and settled in New Orleans, accompanying her husband on his coastal voyages in their own vessel, and managing their finances.
[37][38] A similar story was published about Catherine Babington, first in her obituary, in Shelby, North Carolina, in 1886, then in a short book by her son outlining her masonic career.
Hailed as the only female mason in the United States, she is said to have obtained the secrets at the age of 16 by hiding in her uncles' lodge room in Princess, Kentucky.
As a teenager, Catherine Sweet (Babington being her married name) attended lodge meetings for a year, hiding in the old pulpit, finally being discovered when one of her uncles returned unexpectedly for a rifle he had left in the ante-room.
[41][42] Having resolved at the outset to adopt the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite as their ritual, the new Grand Lodge found itself with only the three craft degrees, and aspiring to a 33-degree system.
Hannah Mather Crocker, in an apology for Freemasonry written in 1815, claims to have presided over such a lodge, yet her description, "founded on the original principles of true ancient masonry, as far as was consistent with the female character" leaves the actual constitution open to question.
A further split occurred in 1913, when those wishing to include higher degrees, specifically the Royal Arch, left to form the Honourable Fraternity of Ancient Freemasons.
These comprise the practices and precepts perceived as "ancient" at the beginning of the 18th century, and frozen in time by Anderson's Constitutions and similar works which followed and copied it.