In news that went largely under the radar, on May 7th the Garrick Club finally voted to allow women members – thus overturning almost 200 years of tradition. The vote, which passed with 60% in favour, came after a relentless campaign by The Guardian to shame the club into changing its membership policy.
The Guardian’s campaign began in March with the publication of a leaked membership list, characterised by the paper as a “roll-call of British Establishment”. The list’s publication undoubtedly caused immense embarrassment for various prominent members, who were suddenly forced to explain to their female colleagues how on earth they could be members of such a sexist, misogynistic, patriarchal organisation.
To give you a sense of how little people cared about the Garrick’s membership policy prior to the Guardian’s campaign, here’s a chart showing Google Search interest for ‘Garrick Club’ in the UK since 2004:
As you can see, the only major spike in the last 20 years occurred in March of 2024.
The obvious argument for maintaining the club’s long-standing traditions – as commentators such as myself, Alison Pearson and Georgia Gilholy noted – is that men and women are different. And so mixed-sex groups are different from all-male groups. This is an undeniable fact.
But dispiritingly few of the Garrick Club’s members have been willing to state it publicly. One wrote a piece for the Daily Mail ridiculing Simon Case and Richard Moore as “a pair of wimps” for resigning under pressure from the Guardian, but he wasn’t willing to reveal his own name. Even the rambunctious and gaffe-prone Boris Johnson, a former member, felt the need to state in an article defending the Garrick that “I would certainly have said that women should be admitted”.
Why? Why shouldn’t individuals voluntarily associate with members of their own sex? After all, the anti-Garrick arguments don’t stack up.
If it’s unfair for the club to exclude women, then it’s unfair for other single-sex organisations to do the same. And the membership policy was already profoundly ‘unfair’ – 99.9% of people could never hope to join due to being too poor and socially irrelevant. As regards the claim that female lawyers and politicians were at some kind of disadvantage, this is highly dubious. The vast majority of lawyers and politicians weren’t members to begin with.
Club convention apparently prevents members from talking about the club (like Fight Club, I guess). But it’s surely possible for them to make general arguments in favour of single-sex organisations. Some of the more right-thinking members, like the BBC’s John Simpson, have been opining in support of women members for years. So why couldn’t their opponents also speak out?
We aren’t privy to exactly what went on at the 7th May vote, but we do know the two-thirds majority required for previous votes to pass was abandoned in favour of a simple majority. (Recall that less than two thirds voted for the recent change.) This speaks of panic among senior members that, God forbid, the Guardian should run another unflattering article.
Why are leading men of Britain being ordered about by a left-wing newspaper? Maybe the Garrick’s roster isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
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