it's all in how you say it

[cellio]

A fellow congregant called and asked me to be on the steering committee (read: board) of the sisterhood.

What I thought: Having a sisterhood (and brotherhood) is anathema to an egalitarian congregation. If we say that men and women don't have assigned roles, why on earth would I want to help perpetrate an organization that tries to go backwards by (re-)assigning those roles? It's not like our sisterhood and brotherhood are trying to move past conventional gender roles -- the women handle babysitting during services and serve cookies and coffee afterwards, and the men hold barbeques and talks by investment bankers. Feh! I want none of it! And not just because babysitting and serving coffee aren't my thing! There's a higher principle here. How can I help you see this?

What I said: I'm flattered, but no.

Comments

[jducoeur]

Out of curiosity, how old is the congregation, and the sisterhood? I tend to think of these as the sorts of artifacts one finds in older (read: more than a couple of decades) organizations.

This is the kind of issue I think about a lot, being active in the Masons, where gender roles are very strictly enforced. IMO, it's one of several cultural artifacts that are killing the organization, since it looks a tad weird to most younger people. But the idea that different genders are supposed to have different roles is an ancient and pervasive meme, and widespread doubt about it is still very new. So most folks over 50 have it set deep in their bones, and can't really shake it...

(One of the very first decisions I made about my Mysteries project was that it wasn't going to pick up the male-only fraternity thing from Masonry. Which reminds me: I still owe my journal a writeup of that project, to maybe spur further work on it...)

[cellio]

The congregation was founded in 1946. I'm not sure about the sisterhood. Our congregation split off from a different one that is, I think, about 140 years old, but I don't know which influences came from there. I do not know the story of the split. I imagine that there were some ideas we took, some ideas we explicitly rejected (else why split?), and a lot of stuff in the middle.

I can see how changing attitudes toward gender roles could pose a problem for the Masons, yes. I imagine that older women find the idea of Eastern Star pleasant (a place of their own), and that younger folks see it as "separate but equal [sic]". And correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't really have the option to have some activities mixed and some segregated, right? Whereas in an Orthodox congregation, for example, worship services will be segregated and women will not be permitted to participate in certain ways, but everyone can go to the same social afterwards (unless the shul is strange -- see another comment above). There's a lot of neat stuff about the Masons that isn't explicitly about gender, but the gender thing will ultimately be the death knell.

[jducoeur]

And correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't really have the option to have some activities mixed and some segregated, right?

It's a little more complex than that. Masonic ritual is strictly male-only (and that's enforced through some of the most carefully-written oaths I've ever seen). Eastern Star is actually mixed-gender, although it's focused on the ladies. (I was Patron of our Chapter when msmemory was Matron.) Baron Steffan put it best, IMO: it's a Victorian man's ideal of a women's organization. That is, it's mostly made of women, and they do most of the work, but several of the most critical formal roles (such as delivering the initiatory obligation) must be performed by men. Also, much of the Masonic social stuff is mixed-gender.

(And a caveat is required: all of this applies only to mainstream Grand Lodge Masonry. There are a number of schismatic organizations, such as Co-Masonry, that don't have the gender hangup. But due to the aforementioned oaths, it's essentially impossible for the mainstream to play with the schisms.)

But overall, I concur that the gender thing is a real problem. (Along with the organization being collectively a little too shy about its ritual, which is IMO the best part of the whole thing, and an excessively rigid formal structure. Hence the Mysteries project -- trying to design an organization with the ritual strengths of Masonry, without the historical baggage...)