Unlike
in America, where the U.S. Golf Association runs the women’s national
championship, the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews has no official
role in the British version, which is conducted by the Ladies’ Golf Union.
However, virtually the moment the Old Course was announced as the 2007 venue,
the R&A offered all competitors the run of its clubhouse for the week, a
gesture both gallant and logical.
Inasmuch as the St. Andrews courses are all public, and therefore
unattached to any single club, there is no obvious gathering point for
competitors—nowhere even to change one’s shoes. The spacious R&A clubhouse,
hard by the 1st tee of the Old Course, was the obvious haven for the
women—except that, for the past 253 years, the R&A has been a steadfastly
men-only establishment. So when word got out that R&A members had offered to
step aside for a week in favor of the women, the British media responded with a
flurry of mock-indignant “what-is-the-world-coming-to” articles.
Allow me to say a few words in defense, not just of the R&A
but also of St. Andrews. The truth is that golf in this town has always been
admirably egalitarian. Access to the Old Course has been available to both
genders equally from day one, 600 or so years ago. Few of America’s venerable
golf venues can make that claim, and many maintain sexist policies.
As for the R&A, they’ve been stepping aside for nearly a
century. The first women’s Ladies’ British Amateur Championship on the Old
Course goes back to 1908, when the club flew the Ladies’ Golf Union flag on its
mast, members served as stewards and rules officials, and the Captain personally conducted tours of the
clubhouse.
Oh, there was a time when women took a bit of a back seat—during
the Victorian Era—but it had less to do with gender discrimination than with the
social conventions of the time. Golf was widely felt to be a bit too rough an
activity for the fairer sex, members of which were expected to save themselves
for more important matters. In Golf: Scotland’s Game, David Hamilton
cites a Dr. Henry Maudsley, whose notion of “fixed energy” posited that women
had a finite amount of vim and vigor, which, when expended on any activity,
limited their reproductive power. The implication was that women who played too
much golf (or anything else) would produce wimpy babies.
Then there were the limitations of the day’s fashions: large
floppy hats secured by scarves atop big, high hairdos, tight-fitting jackets,
high-collared shirts with balloon sleeves, and long-flowing skirts, to say
nothing of the mysterious substructure of bustles, petticoats and corsets. One
of the game’s keen observers of the time, Lord Wellwood, suggested that the
farthest a woman might expect to hit a drive was only 70 or 80 yards, “not
because we doubt a lady’s power to make a longer drive but because this cannot
be done without raising the club above the shoulder. Now, we do not presume to
dictate, but we must observe that the posture and gestures requisite for a full
swing are not particularly graceful when the player is clad in female dress.”
