Social Science Research Council

"Seeking Sisterhood: Elite Constructions of Gender in the Italian Freemasonry"

This project will investigate the production and performance of gender identity within an upper-class 'secret society' in contemporary Italy: the Freemasonry. While the Freemasonic 'brotherhood' has traditionally reserved access for men only, women have found paths towards membership and 'sisterhood' that defy their official exclusion. In this project, I will foreground women's experiences within this elitist, male-dominated, esoteric institution to help demystify the workings of power in the highest ranks of society, and to identify new ethnographic possibilities for the interdisciplinary study of gender. Women's participation in the Italian Freemasonry has taken primarily one of three forms: a) initiation in special orders for female relatives of Freemason men; b) initiation in 'heretical' co-ed groups; c) initiation in 'heretical' women-only orders. Recognizing that elite women are not a monolithic group, I will compare these Freemasonic orders to investigate the plurality of meanings that gender acquires through different experiences of 'sisterhood'. Rather than reducing women's involvement in the Freemasonry to a simple mimicking of male 'brotherhoods', I take the elaboration of a discourse of 'sisterhood' in its own terms, as a powerful and understudied expression of identity politics in elite women's activism. Freemason women occupy an awkward epistemological space in social theories. As members of an elite nationalist organization, they have mostly been neglected by feminist scholarship focused on leftist, grass-root movements. As women, they have mostly been ignored by scholarship on nationalist organizations or the upper-classes, predominantly centered on men's experiences. Interpreting women's initiation in Freemasonic orders in contemporary Italy as an understudied form of gender- and class-based mobilizing, this project will examine politically conservative strategies of women's activism, and the dynamic ways in which gender is shaped by nationalist values of high culture, knowledge, and intellectualism.