. by "getting hold of their dirty
secrets and making them our slaves"]; the second, the ardent,
devoted and capable women, but who are not ours because they have
not reached a practical revolutionary understanding, without
phrase--we must make use of these like the men of the fifth
category [i.e. by "drawing them incessantly into practical and
perilous manifestations, which will result in making the majority
of them disappear while making some of them genuine
revolutionaries"]; finally, the women who are entirely with us,
that is to say completely initiated and having accepted our
programme in its entirety. We ought to consider them as the most
precious of our treasures, without whose help we can do
nothing.[695]

The first and only woman to be admitted into real Masonry, if such a
term can be applied to so heterogeneous a system, was Maria Deraismes,
an ardent French Feminist celebrated for her political speeches and
electioneering campaigns in the district of Pontoise and for twenty-five
years the acknowledged leader of the anti-clerical and Feminist
party.[696] In 1882 Maria Deraismes was initiated into Freemasonry by
the members of the Lodge _Les Libres Penseurs_, deriving from the Grande
Loge Symbolique Ecossaise and situated at Pecq in the Department of
Seine-et-Oise. The proceeding being, however, entirely unconstitutional,
Maria Deraismes's initiation was declared by the Grande Loge to be null
and void and the Lodge _Les Libres Penseurs_ was disgraced.[697] But
some years afterwards Dr. George Martin, an enthusiastic advocate of
votes for women, collaborated with Maria Deraismes in founding the
_Maconnerie Mixte_ at the first lodge of the Order named "Le Droit
Humain." The _Supreme Conseil Universel Mixte_ was founded in 1899.

The Maconnerie Mixte was political and in no way theosophical or occult,
and its programme, like that of the Grand Orient, was Utopian Socialism,
whilst by its insistence on the supremacy of reason it definitely
proclaimed its antagonism to all revealed religion. Thus in the involved
language of Dr. George Martin himself:

The Ordre Maconnique Mixte Internationale is the first mixed,
philosophic, progressive, and philanthropic Masonic Power to be
organized and constituted in the world, placed above all the
prooccupations of the philosophical or religious ideas which may be
professed by those who ask to