Susan Mitchell Sommers

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Order of the Eastern Star in the Historiography of American Women’s Associations

Although the phenomenon of women in freemasonry has enjoyed considerable attention in European scholarship, the involvement of American women in fraternal organizations goes virtually unnoticed by the academic community. This is especially true for several American women’s organizations based on fraternal associations—the Order of the Eastern Star, the Degree of Rebekah, and the Pythian Sisters. This paper focuses attention on the largest of these groups, the Order of the Eastern Star, identifying and exploring the particular lacuna in the growing historiography of women’s voluntary associations in America that leaves the OES untreated.