Echos From "The Big Job's Daughters Secret"

Blogspot gives me statistics on views of my posts. I also get emails notifying me of comments and giving me the content of them. By far the most visited and  most commented on post is "The Big Job's Daughters Secret", posted way back on January 23rd, 2010. Over 11 years later, every month it still gets dozens of new looks. Every once in a while it gets a comment.

Some of them break my heart. I found my experience confusing and somewhat isolating. I always assumed it was just that I didn't "get" the lodge experience and couldn't figure out why, exactly, we were all there. Some women came to its defense, proclaiming how wonderful it was, but there are several commenting on their common experiences of ostracization and isolation. Here was supposed to be a "guaranteed" chance to belong to an organization that would support you in open fellowship wherever you went that had another lodge. With the parent organization being Masons, that should be world wide. (To those who had that kind of experience, I am happy for you. I found it much later in life in a very different place.)

It's like a sorority but it follows you throughout your life as you graduate to Eastern Stars, and can support and follow your family as well. Instead it seems for many to be the high school girls' version of "Lord of the Flies." Nobody dies, but souls shrivel. Scars remain for decades.

It begs the question of whether this is deliberate, somehow weeding out whatever or whomever is considered "undesirable"? Perhaps a "correction" of failing to blackball some members before they can join? Or is this just a logical mean-girls way of dealing with lack of adult guidance to show the way towards some kind of personal growth among its members? Are we who didn't thrive determined by others to be inferior? Or might they be lacking in character, or perhaps training, for not bringing us fully into the fold?

The relative popularity of a single post from a fairly obscure blog leads me to believe that this is an issue still resounding for many. I wonder if anybody reads this and resolves to make some course corrections, if in fact any are possible in this kind of "we're better (fairest in all the land)" club. Do Job's Daughters thrive these days? Do its members still graduate to Eastern Stars? 

I even wonder if, like my particular bethel, they all happen to be white and protestant only, or was that just an artifact of the small Minnesota town we lived in back then? It was never on my radar as a teenager in the 60's, still before civil rights marches exploded into the news. BLM makes it almost impossible to avoid the question now. I'll be linking this to my original post, and if any of you care to comment on this in particular, I'd welcome any and all input.