Most British Open clubs admitted women begrudgingly

PERSPECTIVE | This year’s site started 127 years ago

Adapted from a column by The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins.

Every year, the British Open takes place at a golf course with its own atmosphere, made up of equal parts antiquated custom, salt-heavy air and local varieties of ankle-clutching grasses.

When the British Open began Thursday at the Royal Birkdale, there was something different about this site, for once.

Skirts.

Birkdale sits in Southport, Merseyside, a handsome old spa-town. It has been admitting female members since 1890, earlier than its brethren clubs by more than a century and a quarter. This is more than a passing curiosity that deserves investigating.

The history of sexism in golf

• The Society of St. Andrews Golfers, founded in 1754, started admitting women in 2015.
• Muirfield’s hard-line members flatly refused to mingle with women until the spring of 2017, arguing that their presence would slow play and upset their “luncheon arrangements,” and capitulated only when it was threatened with removal from the British Open rotation.
• Susan Reed, former editor of Golf For Women magazine, jokes, “In golf, it’s 1956.”

At the Royal Birkdale, though…

• Free-swinging women were accepted from the first.
• The club was opened in October 1889 by a handful of Lancashire gentry, who voted unanimously in favor of allowing women to play three days out of the week.
• Within months they had approved the admission of 14 lady members.
• By 1897, Birkdale had 44 lady members alongside 112 men, and eventually their numbers would grow to 150.

Why’d they approve women to the club?

• According to Birkdale’s club historian and memorabilia chairman, John Rostron, the reason was, as ever, economic. The women of Birkdale had money and standing. In Southport, where Birkdale was located, the percentage of female taxpayers was double that in the rest of England. And the town became so female-dominated that a secondary school for girls opened 17 years before one for boys.

No wonder Birkdale has been a remarkable aberration in the history of golf.