After 200 years, women can join the Garrick. Now for the task of making it share power, not hoard it | Jemima Olchawski

  (The Guardian) : Last night’s membership vote is a step in the right direction, but this remains a closed, elite institution Britain’s “old boys’ club” suffered a blow last night. The Garrick Club – an exclusive gentlemen’s club in central London and relic of some 19th-century fantasy of male dominance – voted to allow women to become members for the first time in almost 200 years. About 60% of the votes were in favour. In the 21st century, there is simply no legitimate justification for the exclusion of women. There actually never was. That the Garrick Club’s exclusionary policy has been so robustly defended in recent weeks speaks to a profound misogyny alive and well in Britain. What would including women do to the refined, rarefied air of the club? Contaminate it with our chit-chat? Our nagging? Would our feminine charms prove too much of a distraction? The refrain of “nothing to see here” is all too familiar to so many women. It’s not a work meeting, it’s just a couple of holes at the golf course. It’s just blowing off steam. It’s just a couple of drinks with the guys. We didn’t think you would want to come. But it’s not plausible to say that work doesn’t happen in spaces like the Garrick, and that these aren’t places where, even loosely, critical decisions are made. Clubs like the Garrick are built for soft networking, the sidebar conversations where real power coalesces, uninterrupted by pesky women. A sense that you belong among its exclusive cohort is in and of itself a means of sustaining male power. The proof is in the revelation of the names of about 60 of the Garrick’s most ..