The Nation's Pulse/Club Lib
Wagner, Geoffrey
THE NATION'S PULSE CLUB LIB by Geoffrey Wagner In 1984 New York's mayor, Ed Koch, found himself facing an important primary. He had not previously been notorious for sympathy to the women's...
...Union League voted to stay all-male in April 1987, and is now in court under the New York State Club Association umbrella, which covers 125 clubs...
...for Cleveland Amory it called to mind "a rather crowded and not very exclusive hotel...
...George's Club, Grenada, celebrating its centenary this year with eighteen members...
...the city could decide to tax the air above your club, let alone deny it food and beverage licenses...
...Which said that the club was a business institution and members could use their dues as business deductions...
...As the primary approached, Hizzoner's conscience compelled him to pass Local Law 63, bravely forcing open the chauvinist portals of such clubs to women, and targeting, as disgraceful exempla, three in particular—University, Century, and Union League...
...Its exterior is graceful, though not extraordinary...
...The club then becomes a public facility...
...How did she know them as such...
...Lo and behold, it's Hizzoner...
...Local 63 showed its hypocrisy in its selectivity...
...Although the Supreme Court enjoined unisexuality on the Jaycees in 1984 (Rotary succumbing a little later), in the Jaycees' case it is interesting to note that Justice Brennan flagged such intrusion into free associations as unconstitutional, an opinion with which liberals like William 0. Douglas and Thurgood Marshall had earlier concurred...
...As an undergraduate at Oxford I was made a member of the select Christ Church Twenty Club with a membership limited to twenty...
...Forbidden Fruit The Ethics of Humanism by Paul Kurtz Paul Kurtz, America's leading secular humanist philosopher, affirms that it is possible to live the good life and be morally responsible—without belief in religion or God...
...The city of Los Angeles slung a suit on its tiny Jonathan Club to open the last all-male part of itself (bar and grill) to women, and the club slung one right back, to invalidate the ordinance, 'It works both ways: a year after New York's University Club opened its doors to women fewer than a dozen have come in...
...but if the law treats that private club as business-oriented then the private club will become so...
...for example, women-only clubs, like the Cosmopolitan and Colony, have not been bothered...
...Politically there was nothing to lose...
...These places have stepped over the threshold by now and can't undo the depredations...
...One of the features of those I knew in my youth in England was to emphasize that you had to have something more than what was in your pocket...
...Fear of the city so ruled the day that one exasperated old Judge rose to wonder why we took any notice of Tammany Hall at all, since in a year or so most of them would be in jail anyway...
...The clubs with strict university affiliations, like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, afford some protection, but Local 63 forces one to turn to money for privacy...
...So I see myself waiting in the Stanford White atrium for my guest...
...After all, there are feminist groups which decry any separate facilities for the sexes as unequal...
...Geoffrey Wagner, Emeritus Professor of English at CCNY, lives in retirement in Grenada...
...however, its interior has great character and reeks of Sargent...
...This is totally contrary to the spirit of the private club...
...Sherlock Holmes's Diogenes Club forbade all speech in public rooms: you conversed, if at all, by signs...
...There has even been one movement to try to get women to urinate standing up...
...It seems to me that the whole ball of wax was largely due to the clubs growing too large...
...So in this self-parodistic world, what do you do, with Local 63 on your back, to keep the cocaine artists out of your club...
...The three targeted clubs in New York City—the University (4,400 members, plus 1,300 ladies with signing privileges), Century (1,900), and Union League (2,500)—are well above the benchmark, but so are the Racquet and Tennis, with 2,200, the Metropolitan Club, with 2,300, and the highly exclusive The Links, with 900...
...It is even, at the edges, a trifle chintzy...
...The smaller the club, therefore, the better...
...Today, ironically enough, I find myself enjoying the most privacy among West Indians, perhaps the last Englishmen around, in the St...
...It exempted any "distinctly private" establishment, defining such as under 400 members...
...Such clubs, Douglas declared, formed a "zone of privacy which precludes the government from interfering...
...The Brook, untouched, is full of power brokers, was indeed once said to run the country...
...The California Club capitulated but the Bohemian Clubs in that state have dragged their feet...
...But this argument cannot suffice...
...Surely, then, one may appeal to justice in such matters, if not reason...
...Despite this University caved in...
...State residents add sales tax...
...after all, the Bohemian Club of San Francisco numbers several U.S...
...Zodiac Club seems to be (numerically) more exclusive still, with only twelve members, no address, and (horresco referens) no telephone number...
...There was clearly a large ingredient of spite motivating Local 63, and when the city of New York has you by the short hairs in such matters there is little you can do about it...
...Down in Washington, D.C., NOW was picketing the celebrated Cosmos Club, of which Justice Blackmun is a member...
...So may the guy in metal-studded jeans who comes off the curb with his I LOVE NEW YORK T-shirt stained from his shortdog bottle of Gallo...
...It exempted religious and women's organizations...
...Meanwhile, capitulation to the unisex ordinances became widespread as clubs digested the vast expense of fighting tax-levy suits, the Houston Club and Union League of Chicago soon throwing in their all-male towels...
...Men so close to city governance as these could be counted on not to want any anti-women vote on their blotters, and such is what the Committee of 1000 simplified it to...
...Could one expect the leading professional city mediator of union disputes to go on the record as anti-women...
...A similar unisex ordinance took effect in the District of Columbia at the turn of last year, while cities from Los Angeles to Buffalo got into the act, issuing local laws designed to break up male social and civic clubs...
...I envisage a day when you can pick up an application for the Brook at the door and pay within by credit card...
...Moreover, it has a thirteen-year wait for election...
...for instance, it grants honorary membership to all college presidents, some of whom these days would not pass muster in the Lower Slobbovian Darts Club...
...The U.S...
...Having now opened up the club to both sexes, the new women should logically share nudity with their male colleagues...
...The slobs can't get into Lutece because they can't afford it...
...T ocal 63 was a law against which la logic was unlikely to win...
...And won what...
...The diligence with which the city went after the University Club was remarkable...
...No, the weasel by which New YorkCity contrived to put the three targeted clubs over the barrel was that exclusion of women meant denial of business opportunities...
...The membership is not elegant...
...ordinance was more rigorously interpreted and its all-female Sulgrave Club required to admit men...
...But the feminist terror squads were abroad and growling around the men-only clubs, urged on by Carol Bellamy, Jacqueline Wexler, and Shirley Chisholm, who once claimed to have been shown the service entrance to the University Club, not an easy area to find since it is sub-street level...
...Which was not merely contrary to the spirit of clubdom but to that of the Internal Revenue Service...
...But the ostensible reason why Koch dumped on University had nothing to do with its enviable purity of membership...
...As a matter of fact, University was preparing to compel the payment of dues and house charges with a signed rider that such would not be used against taxes...
...Interestingly, the Polish-American Citizens Club of Boston, which said it would close if forced to admit women, has yet to be approached by the feminist hit squads...
...If you run a restaurant or bar in Washington or Gotham any transvestite can wander off the street and demand service (and, in Manhattan, demand that a menu be displayed on the door...
...This original and penetrating new book offers concrete guidelines to transcend the limitations of traditional theistic morality and achieve a higher stage of ethics...
...At noon its main atrium was always filled with contented lady guests and wives of members, who could use most areas of the club except for those where men went about in the buff, such as the squash floor or in and around the basement pool...
...As Roger Starr put it in the Public Interest last fall, New York City "narrowed its main target to the clubs that the women's movement found offensive...
...400 pages • ISBN 0-87975-454-0 Cloth $19.95 • ISBN 0-87975-455-9 Paper $11.95 Prometheus Books 700 East Amherst St., Buffalo, NY 14215 Call toll free (800) 421-0351 In N.Y...
...And this time I'll be able to answer, "You can wear one if you want to...
...All I have personally learnt from a lifetime of New York City service is that the higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of its backside...
...Thus, because the club was just about the most publicly accommodating imaginable, it is slated to be a public accommodation...
...The largest of these, the University Club, was the most hospitable to women, with its mixed-sex functions, unisex luncheons and dinners, ground-floor ladies' lounge and dining room...
...Indeed, one objection to the inclusion of women was that it might mean (illegal as well as unaesthetic) alteration to a handsome example of turn-of-thecentury Americana: some of the finest Carrara marble in the city will be cut up to make way for women's johns...
...One New York woman complained of being turned away from the Union League Club by "two giant Nubians...
...Members' wives used to be able to use all their areas without scrutiny from any admissions committee...
...The Mayor banned city employees from conducting business with the club and threatened to get the Licensing Board to withhold liquor and food licenses...
...The Kochs of the world will make male clubs into so many bowling alley parking lots with chewing gum and CCs (Collapsible Containers or condoms) on sale at the front desk, alongside copies of newcomers' constitutional rights which their lawyers are too busy defending to read...
...The club's counsel pointed out that it already admitted women, a fact of which the filing city attorney seemed unaware, and that the women did not want intrusion into the club's affairs any more than the male members did...
...if they look like Andrea Dworkin or Betty Friedan there should be no problem (with male members...
...Further, at the University Club, as at the D.C...
...He had not previously been notorious for sympathy to the women's movement any more than to city retirees or minority landlords (while retaining for himself a rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village...
...the exclusion, said Tuttle, represented "discrimination in its ugliest form...
...which had been initiated by an infuriated councilwoman with tight shoes called Joy Picus...
...They won the right to give women access to our alleged male business discussions...
...The object is privacy...
...University once had a ladies' dining room to which men might go only when accompanied by their wives...
...De-ny him a room and he will appeal to the nearest Commission on Human Rights...
...FORBIDDEN FRUIT THE ETHICS OF HUMANISM PAUL KURTZ 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988...
...In an implacable suit and clammy face Theodore Kheel spoke loudest and most excitably...
...Further idiocies abound...
...It regularly rented out rooms and space to nonmember groups of whose composition THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 31 it had no prior knowledge...
...It did so at a meeting I attended on June 2, 1987...
...State call (716) 837-2475 Add $2.25 for postage and handling...
...This was where power brokers gathered, the reasoning goes, and men didn't want women in power...
...By now these groups have their defenses ready, though to the consternation of New York's City Hall the Washington, D.C...
...The Supreme Court may have come out on the side of the clubs by the time you read this, but to what purpose...
...Metropolitan Club (briefcases and legal pads forbidden), no business could be conducted on the premises, both clubs having strict rules against the showing of commercial papers in all areas...
...Presidents in its membership, including Ronald Reagan...
...How this bundle of thrashed-out brains ever got into the club alongside the bat guano remains a mystery to me...
...The concern proved catching...
...Controller Rick Tuttle countered that the club continued "to openly degrade women" by disallowing them bar and grill service, though there had been no complaints...
...Today such become "spouses," the male versions of which, unsupervised, may now enter all elements of the club at any time...
...it was therefore the most vulnerable and aggressively harassed, though more recently, after University's vote to admit women, it was the Union League that was cited by the NYC Human Rights Commission for sex bias...
...As he fumbles with his greasy necktie he asks, "What's the dress...
...Turn a club into a pub and you transfer onto it all sorts of bunco infringements, for which that straggle of Chinatown at the wormy foot of the Apple, off Center Street, has courts in plenty a-waiting, not to mention more than 300 Assistant District Attorneys in Manhattan, yet more in Brooklyn...
...White's dues in the fifties were, I seem to recall, twenty-five guineas a year, those of Boodle's (the aristocracy) less...
...The room has now been decreed discriminatory and retitled a general eaterie, thus depriving women of self-protection...
...Which said that we had business discussions...
...Local 63 clearly sees the club as an extension of the workplace, which it is not...
...The group included as signatories such names as Walter Wriston and David Rockefeller, whose brother Nelson had died in the saddle (riding bareback) right next door...
...Stephen Birmingham's America's Secret Aristocracy shows that, when allowed to be, Americans have been as elitist as any nationals in forming private clubs...
...Last year the Supreme Court, to the open dismay of City Hall, agreed to review the constitutionality of Local 63...
...New York's Local 63 was used as a prototype around the land...
...The book includes important chapters on privacy, the common moral decencies, the excellences of the good life, responsibility, a global ethics, and human rights...
...Far from it...
...last year one male applied for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, while in Maryland two men sued over their exclusion from an all-female aerobics class (the three lost...
...The discussion was dominated by members of a Committee of 1000, a well-organized pro-feminist body which reminded me that in New York magazine Jane Edmunds had likened the University Club to "an automobile convention...
...Few have shown up for membership.' America being America, properly absurdist gestures have been made to point up the silliness of all this...
...Yet this yardstick has been used with scandalously contemptuous selectivity...
...The University Club, to which I have belonged for a quarter of a century, is a landmarked Stanford White building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 54th Street in Manhattan...
...The Committee of 1000 won, two to one...
Vol. 21 • July 1988 • No. 7
