Harvard Hall at the Harvard Club, New York City. Credit: https://www.hcny.com/
It’s a small example and yet, I think, a telling one: how women were admitted as members to the Harvard Club of New York City.
Nothing would have happened, or at least nothing would have happened then—in 1971—if there hadn’t been violent protests at the college itself against the escalation of the war in Vietnam. As is so often the case, a crack in society’s veneer, particularly thick and shiny in the case of the so-called Ivy League universities—many, like Harvard, sporting few examples of ivy—allowed other questions to emerge.
Only a few people showed up at a special meeting at the club to consider the question of women members; at Radcliffe, the women’s “Annex”—as it was called— to Harvard, we’d occupied an uneasy space which I remember well, with no faculty of our own and little standing at the august institution to which we walked or biked from our dorms for instruction. None of us had ever complained about our exclusion from the Harvard libraries; that was an unwritten rule that didn’t need to be written: we all knew how to obey.
Those of us who were sometimes in New York and wanted to visit the club were used to descending through a special door into a basement Ladies’ Lounge where to this day there are cubicles with dressing tables, mirrors, stools, and red and white curtains that could be drawn to hide an uncomfortable snooze. From there, we could go upstairs only to join our dates in the main body of the club. I remember viewing the arrangement with tolerant amusement, often in those days our way of accepting the unacceptable, a “boys will be boys” kind of thing.
Indeed the questions raised by a few of these boys to admitting women—most members seemed to have no opinion—have the familiar tone of that old excuse. What about women overcrowding the dining room at lunch time—“The Ladies Who Lunch” was a popular song. (It was assumed that the same ladies would not venture out in the evening for dinner.) Even worse, how would the men in the club’s gym deal with the appearance of half-clad women? The gyms were always a safe space for male nudity and discreet observation of those parts usually concealed.
Probably the deciding factor was that membership in the all-male club was declining at a precipitous rate. The times they were a-changing and all the male institutions, social and intellectual, were feeling the impact. Women’s memberships would help the club meet its budget.
Watergate was happening in Washington, and a cease-fire agreement, ending the Vietnam war, was finally signed in Paris. Each of these events in the big world affected the tiny world of the Harvard Club. The first woman member was elected in 1973; a daughter of a presidential advisor, she could hardly have been turned down.
It seems unlikely that one male member’s dissatisfaction with Club’s martinis could be laid down to the presence of women; they tasted, he claimed, as though they had been poured out of an old tennis shoe. Certainly the few new women members—there were only two dozen the first year—helped the club which, like all of its ilk, had to raise its dues to remain solvent. Those admitted last may have been the ones most willing to pay: anything for inclusion.
Our increasing presence maybe accounted for the first presentation of dinner-theater, popular in an earlier century. The choice was Victor Herbert’s The Red Mill (1906) that featured a song called “Every Day is Ladies’ Day with Me.”
The big old club has never lost its whiskey and cigars ambience; the walls are lined with gold-framed oil portraits of former club presidents although three women have now been included; the hosts of leather armchairs seem designed for male behinds, and the complaint about the martinis was address humorously in a club member’s verse, ending, “Oh, I beseech you, friend of mine/Bring on martinis one to nine”—the correct proportion of gin to vermouth.
And this is the way things change.
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