Nineteenth-Century Women's Auxiliaries and Fraternal Orders

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fraternal orders such as the Masons, Odd Fellows, and Knights of Pythias were a ubiquitous part of the American social landscape, their total membership numbering in the millions. Because it was an institution explicitly organized around the principle of masculine identity, the fraternal order is an especially revealing part of the larger system of nineteenth-century gender relations. Its significance as a form of male social organization, the particular versions of masculine and feminine identity that it proposed, and the feminine responses that it evoked are the subjects of this essay.