cronereport.com

It’s amazing to me that places like this still exist:

Women at the [Phoenix Country Club] are not permitted to have lunch in the men’s grill room with their husbands after a round of golf; they have been barred from trophy ceremonies after tournaments, even ones they have sponsored…As teenage boys saunter into the sumptuously appointed men’s grill room, their mothers are relegated to the ladies’ grill, down the hall with a hot plate, some card tables and no bar. “The ladies’ grill is a very small room where a bunch of little old ladies gather to play cards…” [the men's grill room] has three high-definition televisions, a buffet and a bar, and gorgeous views of the course.

Attempts to change the policy resulted in that ever-so-popular method of mature, sophisticated debate, urinating on private property.

The women have been accused of being FemiNazis…because the Nazis, they were all about equal rights.

I have no problem with calling myself a feminist, a tag that apparently women of a younger generation avoid (I’d like to meet some of these women, and maybe hire them, because it would be to my personal advantage to pay someone less than they’re worth). My personal introduction to separate-but-unequal male and female facilities was at the age of 10.

In 1967, my parents sent me to a Catholic girls’ camp called —I kid you not—Camp Immaculata. We had some cabins, and an arts and crafts shack, and sing-a-longs around the piano. Outdoor activities were mostly some simple game played in an empty field with a ball, such as dodgeball or kickball or spud. Swimming meant marching across the highway to the Peconic Bay, where we wore color-coded bathing caps to indicate our age, and could only go out so far. At 10, I was relegated to 3-feet-deep water, even though I’d been swimming in the deep end of the pool for years.

We had two field trips that summer. One was walking down the highway to Dairy Queen. The other was a trip to the boys’ camp run by the same Catholic Youth Organization (CYO).

That trip was a revelation. They had tents in a forest, a lake with a dock and canoes and a diving platform, sports facilities. They had a bonfire. It was like going from the Motel Six to the Sheraton—everything was so much cooler, looked so much more fun, was so far superior to playing dodge ball in a field.

That was the first time I ever saw with my own eyes a place where I was getting the dregs simply because I had the tough luck of being female.

I hope the women of the Phoenix Country Club are successful in their lawsuit. And the men who have joined the effort—a lot of the men also find the policy appalling, and would like to have the option of having a beer with their wives.

And if the lawsuit is unsuccessful, they could always try urinating on the green.