I wanted to add a suffix to crone and damsel that would make them masculine without resorting to a male equivalent word, (that's a different question.)
We have the male-to-female conversion example of bachelor → bachelorette
Is there a reverse suffix for traditionally feminine words?
Croner and damseler (following widower ← widow) seems lacking.
Best Answer
Historically, there are very few words where the male version is derived from the female. For example, A junior English grammar (1902) lists four: bridegroom, drake, gander, and widower (but OED does not support the claim that drake and gander were formed this way).
You already mentioned widower, so let's look at bridegroom. According to OED, it was formed from brýd + guma. The word bride is obviously still in use, but guma is not. In Middle English it was spelled gome. According to OED:
Because gome is obsolete, as is the sense of groom meaning "lad", it's not a great choice.
However, there is another option (not a suffix though) not mentioned by that source. The prefix man- is used in several compounds, for example:
(Note that some of these compounds can be written as closed or hyphenated too.)
Interestingly enough, there are some instances already out there for the words you mentioned:
Yet another option may be to look for synonyms, where the word doesn’t have an etymological connection. Some resources for the words you listed are: