Besant and Charlotte Despard, played a significant role in the women’s suffrage movement,60 with women masons joining suffrage marches in their regalia.61


Race, Empire and Nationality In the past, there has been an overemphasis on the importance of economic activity as a component of social identity. The study of gender has been one way in which scholars have demonstrated the complexity of social identity; another has been race, a further area where research into freemasonry offers exciting possibilities. The best-known illustration of this is Prince Hall freemasonry, the form of freemasonry organised by blacks in America,62 which has been seen by scholars such as William Muraskin and Loretta Williams as significant in defining and nurturing a black middle class in America, 63 although Williams in particular emphasises the contradiction between the universalist ideology of freemasonry and the separate segregated character of Prince Hall masonry. 64 There are many other areas in which freemasonry offers insights into ethnicity which are less well explored. Freemasonry was a major cultural component of the British Empire. The English Pro Grand Master Lord Carnarvon declared in the 1880s that «Where the flag goes, there goes freemasonry to consolidate the Empire». 65 The mixed race lodge offered a social venue in which coloniser


and colonised mixed in the British Empire. Rudyard Kipling declared of his lodge in Lahore that «there aint such things as infidels» among the «Brethren black an’ brown’».66 The importance of this area of research has been brilliantly demonstrated by a study by Augustus Casely-Hayford and Richard Rathbone of freemasonry in colonial Ghana.67 This shows how «freemasonry was amongst the bags and baggage of both


60 John Hamill and R. A. Gilbert, op. cit., pp. 185-6; Daniel Ligou (ed.), Histoire des franc-maçons en France de 1815 à nos jours, Toulouse: Editions Privat 2000, pp. 154-8; Nord, op. cit., pp. 27-28. Information about Charlotte Despard and masonic suffragette marches provided by Ann Pilcher-Dayton. See Appendix, Document No. 9,


below. 61 Ex info Ann Pilcher Dayton. 62 Hamill and Gilbert, op. cit., pp. 208-9. See Appendix, Document No. 10, below. 63William A. Muraskin, Middle-Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America, Berkeley: University of California Press 1975; Loretta J. Williams, Black Freemasonry and Middle-Class Realities, Columbia,


University of Missouri Press 1980; cf. Putnam, op. cit., pp. 339, 389-91. 64Williams, op. cit., pp. 128-134. 65 A. A. Cooper, “Freemasonry in Malawi”, Ars Quatuor Coronatorum 103 (1990), p. 230 66 David Gilmour, The Long Recessional: The Imperial life of Rudyard Kipling, London: John Murray, 2002), p. 69;


cf. p. 17. See Appendix Documents Nos. 11-12, below. 67 Augustus Casely-Hayford and Richard Rathbone, “Politics, Families and Freemasonry in the Colonial Gold


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