A Women-Only Golf Course can be intimidating!
A Women-Only Golf Course can be intimidating!
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Golf Blog by the Mel Sole Golf School.
Ladies Golf Club of Toronto.
I played The Ladies Golf Club of Toronto when I lived there in the late 1980s. Invited by one of my female students who was a member there, as I walked into the clubhouse, I immediately felt what thousands of women have felt for centuries, a sense of not belonging. Smiling at my unease, I gave it a thumbs up for women's equality!
It is a wonderful golf course, and men are still not welcome as members but are allowed to play the course and can even buy a season pass. However, as many female golfers have experienced at other clubs, men can't get a morning tee time! Isn't that cool?
“The Ladies Golf Club of Toronto” opened in 1926. The founder, Ada MacKenzie, a two-time Canadian Ladies Open Winner, had to pretend she was purchasing the land as the wife of Canadian golf course architect Stanley Thompson in order to get financing in those days.
Thanks to Josh Sens via GOLF.com for this interesting article.
Tell me, guys, will you play this course if invited?
Once just as calcified as male-dominated clubs, the Ladies' has added cheeky come-ons to attract younger members.
When I first got wind of a golf club just for women, I imagined a dour stronghold of stern-faced feminists. Presiding secretary: Gloria Steinem. No leaving the seat up. A lack of single malt.
I initially read about the Ladies' Golf Club of Toronto -- North America's lone women-only golf club -- about a decade back, when golf was having its big gender conversation. Martha Burk was picketing in Georgia, bemoaning Augusta National's lack of female members. The green jackets were saying that change would come on their terms, not "at the point of a bayonet," and it has. The Ladies' made headlines again last summer, as Scotland's Muirfield, which has no women members, played host to the British Open.
Defenders of the Old Guard.
Defenders of the old guard liked to point to the Ladies' Club, among other women-only institutions, as proof that gender bias could work both ways. "They've got theirs," they sniffed. "Why can't we have ours?"
Now another British Open nears, and same-sex clubs have become big news once more, a hot-button pushed by the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, whose members run the British Open and oversee the Rules of Golf outside the United States and Mexico. In September, the club will vote on whether to allow women into its tweedy midst for the first time in its 260-year history.
All of which has got me thinking of the Ladies'. Could the tales be true? Is it the female Muirfield? Augusta National on estrogen?
The reporter in me hopes so.
It's a sun-dappled morning, and I'm driving through the leafy outskirts of Toronto. The turnoff to the club lies ahead.
It's not Magnolia Lane. No guard sits at the entrance. But the road leads past a nest of pretty paw-print bunkers and toward a hilltop clubhouse done in classic Butler Cabin colors: milky white with pine-green trim.
"We want to be mad at you, but we can't."
Loryn Crothers, the club's membership director, is waiting for me outside. "A lot of people tell us, 'We want to be mad at you,'?" she says. "But then they see what the club is like, and they say, 'But we just can't.'?"
As we step into the clubhouse, my first assumption crumbles. It's less Martha Stewart Living, more Merion.
On one wall, displayed as reverently as Hogan's 1-iron, is a hickory-shaft putter used by the club's founder. On another is a painting of the matriarch herself: the late Ada Mackenzie.
Born in Toronto in 1891, Mackenzie was the youngest of four kids. Excelling in hockey, tennis, basketball and cricket. Taking up golf at 10 and became a star. She later noted in a history of the club, "when women were supposed to know more about a cook stove than a niblick."
Expectations hadn't changed in 1923.
When Mackenzie won her second Canadian Ladies Open, she ranked among the most accomplished players in the country. But couldn't land a weekend tee time at the club where she belonged. The same was true everywhere she went, with the lone exception (sort of) being the British Isles, where Mackenzie competed in her prime.
At top clubs there, women's golf was half-embraced. Behind the clubhouse at St. Andrews sat the Ladies' Putting Club, one of 14 women's short courses or "hen runs" scattered across the countryside at the time. Never mind that only putting and chipping were permitted, the better to spare women from the unladylike act of lifting their arms above their heads. The mere existence of such courses inspired Mackenzie. She would do the British one better, although she couldn't let the world in on her plans.
"If I had said I was looking for a ladies' golf course site," she acknowledged decades later, "I might still be looking."
Instead, she concocted a ruse. Posing as the wife of the noted Canadian golf course architect Stanley Thompson, who played along and eventually would design the golf course, Mackenzie purchased farmland on Toronto's fringes. She had backers, and although there were hiccups and hang-ups along the way, the club took root and opened for play in 1926.
Here's a crucial point to note about the Ladies': from the start, men have been welcome -- just not as members, or, in the early days, in the clubhouse. They didn't and still don't, get prime tee times. But while women enjoyed top billing (the original men's locker room was a chilly basement chamber below the pro shop), they've never tried to make their club a statement. It's not a protest but a place to play. A Women-Only Golf Course can be intimidating!
"I went there for the golf on a beautiful and challenging course," says longtime Ladies' member Marlene Streit, winner of the U.S. Women's Amateur and the British Ladies Amateur, and the first Canadian elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame. "I never thought of myself as a feminist."
Check out the rest of this interesting story here.
Source: GOLF Josh Sens Mel Sole Golf School
Pictures: James Bennett Toronto Ladies Golf Club
Thanks for reading - A Women-Only Golf Course can be intimidating! The (golf) shoe is on the other foot!
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