Goodbye to men's clubs

After all these years, I realise that I'd been working on a hunch, an unconscious rule, which has only now surfaced and made itself known to what I choose to call my brain.

This is the rule: that in great issues, in conflicts like those between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Catholics and the Protestants of Northern Ireland, the unending see-saw in Central America between civilian governments and military coups, commentary has no place unless it can offer a plausible solution. And I have to admit, like the late E. B. White when the Japanese were threatening their neighbours, I have no plan concerning Japan.

By the same rule, I haven't talked much lately about the tidal wave of drugs pouring into this country from Central and South America, though there've been lashings of reportage, hours and hours of indignant debate on the tube. Everybody from the humblest family with a child on crack to the two gallivanting contenders for the presidency have wrung their hands and shaken their heads and have come to a common conclusion, that supply is not the problem, but demand. That the supply of cocaine and heroin and the rest will only slacken when the demand diminishes and the supply will dry up when the demand is stopped. But nobody says how that's to be done.

What Mr Bush and Mr Dukakis and the Reverend Jackson wind up saying is that education is the answer, which means that somehow – nobody specifies how – the addicts will be educated not to want the stuff. To legalise it, it is now sadly apparent, after early experiments in Britain and Sweden, would, on the American scale, turn millions of the young into subsidised vegetables. The Congress has been suitably aroused for some time but has come to the tentative conclusion that educating people out of their addiction is going to be long and slow and, in the meantime, the thing is to appropriate millions of dollars and beef up the American military patrols of the southern borders of the United States with more helicopters and sub-radar planes and more coastguard cutters.

This solution which, on the surface, looks tough and practical is a physical, a logistical, impossibility. The southern border of the United States, from the northern tip of the Florida peninsula round the Gulf of Mexico, on across Louisiana and Texas and New Mexico, Arizona, California, is calculated at anything between eight and twelve thousand wriggling miles. It would take a force as vast as the Russian presence on the Chinese border and all the coastguards of all the Americas to police every intruder, check every immigrant, stop and search every airplane, big and little.

So the people against the military patrol proposal come back to this vague, very desirable, solution of education. It's been proved over and over in many states, hundreds of schools, thousands of sad homes, that people cannot be educated against their will, that the desire to be 'clean' as they say, must come from the addict. And so far, nobody I've read or heard says how that's to be done. The only effective education being done in public schools here and there, but on a tiny scale, is being done patiently and valiantly, by usually black teachers, grievously close to the problem, who scare the living daylights out of the very young before they turn into the addled playmates on the block.

I'll keep you informed if anyone comes through with not a proposal but a solution. In the meantime, I think horrendous descriptions of the problem and sorrowing commentaries on it do little more than say, 'Isn't it awful and why aren't these sad people more like us?'.

However, some nagging social problems eventually get solved and one of them, which has been brewing for at least 25 years since Betty Friedan put out her pioneer feminist tract called 'The Feminine Mystique', seems to have found a solution in the place where, in this country, controversial laws eventually get overturned or sealed and delivered as an example to the whole nation. And that place is the Supreme Court of the United States.

I shall try to report this long, bubbling social problem with proper fairness and seriousness, but I have to warn you that in its chequered history down three decades, it has developed many comical, even ludicrous, turns. It has to do with one expression of equal rights for women, the right of women to go where men go. There was, at one time, a proposal by a lunatic fringe that unisex lavatories would be a good start. Well it advanced into an assault, a very tiny assault, on men's bars. I recall two of the early offensives, not much more than sniper patrols.

There is a famous saloon in downtown New York, almost next door to a store that specialises in Ukrainian books and records. The saloon antedated the Ukrainian invasion by about 50 years. It's been there since 1854. It has been sung about and written about and painted. I imagine John Sloan's 'A Mug of Ale at McSorley's', would bring a tidy price at Christie's today. Up to 1970, it was a downtown haven for what used, innocently, to be called 'the drinking man'. In that year, two liberated young women went in there and astonished the beery mob by demanding a drink. They were ridiculed, they were served, they didn't come back and the McSorley veterans assumed that one feminist goal had been blocked.

But two or three other determined feminists marched uptown and performed a flanking movement against the very toney, upscale bar of the Plaza Hotel which had an actual prohibition against women. It was, like many thousands of corner bars, in hotels around the country marked or set aside as men's bar. Well, there, too, the women were mocked with bows and chuckles and went away but very soon they brought suit and on the ground that no public facility leasing city land and/or services could exclude anyone on account of race or sex, the women won. McSorley's then got the word around that it was ready to befriend not only the drinking man, but the drinking woman.

The big attack which has been mounting for at least a dozen years was against men's clubs. As in all Western metropolises, New York has had them for a long time, most of the... of the swagger ones, since the 1890s, when the first flood of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe suggested to the now well-established males of English, Dutch and German origin that while the pot was melting so noisily on the streets, it might be better to set up clubbable preserves where they could mingle only with their own kind.

That phrase 'with their own kind' is really at the root of the protest movement against the mixing of club memberships and not only against the intrusion of females, but earlier in the Sixties against the admission of Jews, Negroes and other non-white minorities.

Well, I don't need to tell you that that battle was lost and the first sign of it came in 1954 when the Supreme Court handed down the momentous ruling that the phrase in the constitution 'the equal protection of the laws' meant that an eight-year-old black girl on the Kansas prairie could not be barred from her neighbourhood white school and that opened the floodgates to a thousand suits and the movement across the nation to desegregate all public facilities, from schools and universities, to restaurants, theatres, restrooms, ball clubs, businesses, the lot.

But private men's clubs held out on the ground that they owned the premises, did not infringe on public services and, surely, had a right to their own view of freedom of assembly, to spend some of their leisure time with their own kind. Irishmen with Irishmen, Jews with Jews, sports buffs with sports buffs and so on. They pointed, pointedly, at the 20-odd thousand exclusive women's clubs in the United States, a lusty American institution if ever there was one. 'If the Supreme Court forbids men's clubs from excluding women, what will you do with all the women's clubs?' I asked a ravishing feminist a few weeks ago. 'I'm against them,' she said.

Well, so far there has been no palpable groundswell among the males of the population to demand their right to break into the women's clubs but the all-male club – and we're not talking now about women as guests, but talking about membership – the all-male club was doomed last Monday when the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a 1984 New York City law which banned discrimination at all clubs that are not distinctly private, meaning vaguely, at the moment, religious or benevolent or mystical organisations. The definition of 'not private' is a club of more than 400 members that provides regular meal service, that has some members dues paid by their employers or where non-members can hire the club for business purposes.

Now, understand, there is no national law forbidding all male clubs or, indeed, much else that the Supreme Court rules on. The court is there to defend individuals against an infringement of their liberties spelled out in the constitution. It proceeds case by case brought by an individual. In Kansas, by an eight-year-old schoolgirl. In New York, by one Ruth Solomon on the first amendment definition of freedom of assembly.

But there were, by last Monday, hundreds of suits pending in many cities against all-male clubs. They were pending or treading water until they saw what the court would do with the New York city law and the defendants, from coast to coast, have learned to their sorrow that the signature of all nine justices on the New York judgment is the writing on the wall. We can anticipate a triumphant stampede from a regiment of women to invade and join men's clubs with little hope of being stopped.

You may wonder who thought up the 400 mark as the cut-off point between a private and a non-private club. I don't know but I should think there might also be a rush to change the rules in many clubs to reduce the permissible membership from 401 to 399.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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