Don’t do us favors
Last week Muirfield golf club voted not to admit women. Sounds like a good idea, but it means they don’t get to host a big championship.
GOLF CHIEFS have stripped course Muirfield of the Open Championship after its members threw out a proposal for women to join the East Lothian club in a move branded “simply indefensible” by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.
The decision by members of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, which owns and runs the club, also drew the ire of Prime Minister David Cameron who said the move was “outdated.”
Yeah, women have had time to learn to play by now.
Henry Fairweather, the club captain, and his committee had recommended that women should be offered membership on the same terms as the men at the 272-year-old
allowed in theclub. However they were left to rue the decision of a minority of fellow members as the proposal failed by just 16 votes at the end of a two-year review of the membership.
You can’t blame them though – all those high squeaky voices would ruin their concentration.
Within minutes of Mr Fairweather announcing the result of the vote in front of the Muirfield clubhouse, the R&A announced it would not be taking The Open back there under the current membership set-up.
“The R&A has considered today’s decision with respect to The Open Championship,” said Martin Slumbers, chief executive of the St Andrews-based organisation that runs golf’s oldest major, which has been staged 16 times at Muirfield, most recently in 2013, when American Phil Mickelson claimed the Claret Jug. “The Open is one of the world’s great sporting events and going forward we will not stage the championship at a venue that does not admit women as members.”
Kate Smurthwaite wrote in the Indy about Muirhead’s Boys Only policy three years ago.
The thing is I’d never heard of Muirfield Golf Club until today and the nearest I’ve been to a golf club in my life involved trying to get the ball over the miniature bridge into the little windmill. When I raised the subject this morning on Facebook the overwhelming reaction seemed to be that the R&A (the sport’s organising body, I had to look that up) are tangentially doing all us girls a favour by keeping us away from something we’re not interested in.
Well that is not the point. That’s like telling Rosa Parks “the back of the bus is actually safer if there’s a crash”. It’s why gay rights activists want marriage as well as things-that-look-like-but-aren’t-actually-marriage. Equality is not about making “good” choices on behalf of other people, it’s about giving them the freedom to make the same good or bad choices as everyone else.
I don’t want golf clubs deciding how much dessert I can eat, either.
Well said, Kate! Given that Mary, Queen of Scots, was a keen golfer back in the sixteenth century I see no reason not to restore the stays quo ante.
Well, if we’re not interested in it (and I’m not; I don’t golf), they wouldn’t have to pass rules to keep us out, would they? We’d stay away in droves. But I know a lot of women who are interested in golfing. Just because I’m not doesn’t mean I should be held up as the example for all women to follow.
Now that we’re discussing sport, there is some bad news: Michelle Payne was badly injured in a race fall the other day. Condition is ‘serious but stable’.
After reading this, my first thought was that gendered clubs are a British specialty – we do not have them here, for sure! As usual in such cases, I checked – with the result that we do have some, but they are a complete novelty in my country, advertising themselves mainly as organizing bachelor parties.
Then I had a conversation with my wife. Context: we are looking for a Spa resort to spend a weekend together, just the two of us. “I found something nice”, she said, “but on weekends it’s women-only”.
This got me curious and further search revealed lots of such places worldwide. See here for an interesting list.
I found also this Guardian article, with the claim that “women-only gyms are a world away from boys’ clubs such as Muirfield”. Maybe that’s true about gyms, I don’t know, but how about Grace Belgravia and other places from the link? No, they definitely do not look like that. They look rather like places of glamour and power, for the rich women to relax and chat … perhaps on topics so fascinating and fashionable as “women as a class”.
Ah, all of this is sooo complicated! There are these two aspects of the fight for women’s rights. On the one hand, we have Ophelia’s “No one helps” – you remember, the sickening video with the thug and the woman hugging her bag “as if it were a teddy bear”. On the other, there is this fight of the rich for access to places of privilege and power – places which the woman from the video would have no chance to visit, independently of how gendered or un-gendered they were. After all, one of the female clubs from the list has “members, 4% of whom are royalty”. ‘Women as a class’ and so on, sure … but, you know, some people are just not quite our class.
I’m all for the first. I must also say that I don’t give a shit about the second.
As much as I would agree with you in theory, I think we make a mistake by trying to divide the women’s movement into “rich” women wanting access and “poor” women wanting a decent life. I think the two are more intertwined than we realize. Yes, it is easy for those of us not in those elevated classes to scorn the women who have nearly everything and just want to get into the “boys” spaces. But this is, again, playing the Oppression Olympics, and is also overlooking one thing – this shows the extremely systemic problem. Rich women have it better in many ways, but they are still treated as second class citizens. We’re not going to be able to solve one problem without solving the other – they are linked by one common denominator, hatred of women. When we try to parse out rich versus poor, white women versus women of color, we all lose. We don’t all have to fight the exact same battles, but it helps if we at least all fight on the same side.
It’s a common practice – divide and conquer. The wealthy have convinced the workers that their biggest enemy is people who look different, so we have racial tensions among people who have more in common with each other than they realize. They divide the women in so many ways – along class lines, along race lines, even along gender identity lines – that it is difficult to accomplish much because the movement is so fragmented. And we go right along with it, helping them maintain the status quo rather than finding a way to acknowledge our differences, and recognize that they are still related. Hatred of women…that is the key we need to work against.
Iknklast, yes, I agree: the Oppression Olympics is nothing more than a trap. I just thought that … well, after having a look at some of these new all-female luxury spaces, I imagined this to be our future. I imagined that instead of “rich boys clubs”, we will obtain a mixture of less and less powerful rich boys clubs and *separate*
safe spacesrich girls spaces (the last ones perhaps mostly in the Spa/Fitness version, at least initially). In this way the elites will achieve their gender balance. As for the rest of the world, we will have to wait patiently for … no, I don’t know for what, not really. For the “trickle-down feminism” to work its magic – perhaps. Or maybe for Santa Claus.No worries, I will be more optimistic tomorrow. Serious promise.