Shelley Bridgeman: Bring back gentleman's clubs

Do you think there's a place for gentleman's clubs? Photo / Creative Commons

Gentleman's clubs seem like something out of a different era. Established in the 19th century, they are indeed relics from a long lost past. The Northern Club's website says it "was founded by a group of prominent professional and business men in 1869 when the popularity of a gentleman's club was at its peak throughout the British Empire".

Dating back to 1853, the Auckland Club was the oldest local institution until it closed its doors in 2010 when its 250 members were able to join the nearby Northern Club which had a reported membership of 1600. My 2006 article examined both of these clubs, revealing that women had finally been permitted to join the Auckland Club in 1993. It wasn't an overwhelmingly successful strategy. The long-term member interviewed said that "we never got the inflow of women members that we'd have liked to have had". I noted without surprise that "[w]omen weren't beating the door down to join a club that had excluded them for 140 years".

It was the 1990 appointment of Dame Catherine Tizard as Governor-General that spurred both the Auckland Club and Northern Club to welcome women as members. Since both institutions prided themselves on having a close relationship with the Queen's representative in New Zealand, pragmatism alone dictated that they needed to move with the times and cease being a club for gentlemen only.

But, as already mentioned, women did not descend in droves. By 2006 just six per cent of the Auckland Club's members were women while a reported ten per cent of the Northern Club's members are female. Regardless of the relaxed gender rules, both remained very much gentlemen's clubs with a few ladies thrown in.

Before I wrote my initial article, I felt that the move to admit women members had been well overdue, that to shun females was a personal slight to women everywhere. But after visiting the clubs and speaking to members, I was more inclined to wonder why any women would want to spend their leisure time in such a testosterone-rich environment. Everything from the decor (patterned carpets, sombre portraits and trophy heads of dead animals) to the rules (often pertaining to the wearing of jackets and ties) were created with men in mind. These are not environments designed to make women feel at home.

Like the token female students in some boys' schools, women in these traditional clubs are there to bolster both the establishment's bank balance and image. Women members represent hitherto untapped revenue for the institution itself and give the impression that it is remaining relevant. The women themselves gain networking opportunities and presumably feel a sense of achievement at having infiltrated such a bastion of masculinity.

Yet this gender dilemma can work the other way around, too. Along with two (female) work colleagues I once set up a book club. We each invited three or four (female) friends to join, and we met monthly for wine and discussion. New members would occasionally join us and we all had a jolly good, sometimes slightly scatty, time.

Then one day someone said they had a male friend who wanted to join. I nearly spat chardonnay on my Flaubert novel. "But this is a book club for women," I said. This was not a popular view. "Look around. We are all women. How can this not be a women's book club?" I asked.

I turned to my fellow founding members for support. "We set this up for women members, didn't we?" I asked. They shrugged. I was overruled. Next thing you knew we had a man in our midst.

As it turned out I hosted one of the first evenings that this (very nice) male infiltrator attended. My husband was banished to our tiny TV room from where he reckoned that he was able to overhear the gendered group dynamics. Although I hadn't shared my own reservations with him, he nonetheless reported that there were just two general types of discussion. There was predominantly an animated gaggle of female voices all good-naturedly talking over each other in short bursts but when the man spoke we all shut up, listened attentively and allowed him to present an uninterrupted monologue.

Now, our behaviour could have stemmed from nothing more sinister than politeness towards a newbie but I suspect it was more likely rooted in sexism. Maybe buried deep within us was the sense that if a man is talking we, as the "weaker sex", are honour bound to listen carefully thus giving him a sense of power and importance. Who knows?

But the example neatly demonstrated why I'd wanted to keep our little group single sex.
A man's presence altered the dynamic, somehow made it more serious, more structured and rendered us less capable of being our authentic selves. Against all the odds, I felt something verging on kinship with those prominent gentlemen of yesteryear who just wanted to be able to hang with their mates without any women around.

What is your view of women joining gentleman's clubs? Are there benefits in single sex social environments?