In defence of men-only members’ clubs
Barracking the Garrick for excluding women isn’t exactly clubbable – how about some healthy competition instead? Asks James Price
Is the male-only Garrick Club a posh creche for old dinosaurs or a bastion of the patriarchy? It’s an interesting question because it engages a clash of principles. There is the right to freedom of association on the one hand, and on the other the idea that everyone should be treated equally regardless of immutable characteristics.
Away from exclusive members clubs, most ordinary people would, of course, see no problem with people occasionally excluding the opposite sex. Boys’ and girls’ nights out are both joyous occasions to catch up with your best friends and a necessary release from certain social pressures. Two female colleagues of mine regularly go on something called a ‘hot girl walk’ at lunch, into which I’ve not dared enquire. You may love your spouse or partner very much, but getting away from them every now and then, and even having a whinge with your best mates, is a normal, cathartic experience.
But in the public sphere, these important but largely benign distinctions between the sexes are often trodden over or weaponised by clumsy communication or wilful misunderstanding. Mary Harrington has written convincingly that whilst elite women may benefit from an end to the more recondite segregations, the impact on those who don’t go drinking in Mayfair and Covent Garden is not as benign. Protecting spaces for biological women is far more important than who gets to dine at a fancy club. After all, much worse than a man being in a male-only space, is a man being in a women-only space like a prison or a changing room. The principle of these spaces is important enough on its own to hopefully prevent sex-based association from ever being completely outlawed.
But it seems a little zero-sum to suggest that men can keep their fancy clubs just so that women don’t have to be threatened on hospital wards. So is there a better way to think about these spaces? The Nobel prize winning economist Gary Becker has argued that organisations which do not discriminate against workers based on immutable characteristics will be able to outcompete those that did because they will be more meritocratic.
The same insight should be applied to clubland. Places that enable interesting, talented and fun women to mix in female-only or mixed environments may prove far more attractive to younger generations than the Garrick is to the old boys. Rather than playing the sexes off against eachother or shaming a fusty business for cleaving to tradition, a little competition could prove the best way to resolve tensions.
That this isn’t being considered is, I fear, because we have allowed the hard left to march through our institutions, neither defending them nor building up new ones more suitable for our times.
Those attacking the Garrick are like the activists who have been steadily taking over other aspects of our cultural heritage – from museums and universities to the National Trust – not because they love it but because they want to destroy it. That’s not the way to make society more equal – and it’s not very clubbable.
James Price is director of government relations at the Adam Smith Institute