This week, the woman likely to become Britain’s first female chancellor was invited to give a lecture at the heart of the economic establishment. And in it, Rachel Reeves briefly paid credit to a woman who went before her. Not Margaret Thatcher – Reeves came more to bury than to praise her – but Mary Paley Marshall, the pioneering economist who in 1874 became one of the first two women allowed to sit her finals at Newnham College, Cambridge, in what was then called moral sciences.
Though Marshall passed with flying colours and went on to lecture in economics at Cambridge, she was never awarded a degree, because those were only for men. So jealously was this privilege guarded that almost two decades later, proposals to award degrees to women sparked a riot. A hostile mob of male students threw eggs, let off fireworks, started a bonfire in the street and marched on the all-female Newnham College.
Staggeringly, it was 1948 before Cambridge began formally awarding degrees to women and 1988 before its last all-male college, Magdalene, grudgingly voted to admit them. And even then, some students paraded around in black armbands as if something important had died. But it was the Oxford and Cambridge Club that held out longest; women with Oxbridge degrees could not become full members of a club that exists only for Oxbridge degree holders until 1996. Until then, men who scraped thirds were favoured over women with firsts.
When men wonder why women won’t just let them have their cosy little clubs in peace, one answer is that we fear the mentality those cosy little clubs can sometimes produce. Which brings us to the defiantly all-male Garrick Club, and the list of members published this week by the Guardian.
The classic gentlemen’s club defence is that it’s just more relaxing to socialise without the opposite sex around; that they’re little different from a girls’ night out or a men’s Sunday five-a-side game. That might be more convincing, however, if the average girls’ night out involved hitting the prosecco with a couple of cabinet ministers, a swath of senior judges, the head of MI6, several A-list actors and a monarch.
It would be fanciful to think the world is being secretly run from inside some oak-panelled Mayfair dining room, of course. But all professional watering holes end up blurring the line between work and pleasure, so it beggars belief that connections are not made, favours not exchanged, old school ties not strengthened in the easy familiarity of a club, even if openly doing business is frowned on. The real problem here is that actively choosing to spend your evenings in the one place women aren’t equal players seems not just weirdly retrograde but uncomfortably at odds with your days spent leading a supposedly modern, diverse company or government department.
What on earth are the levelling up secretary, Michael Gove, and the deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, doing in a men-only club in 2024? It’s more than two decades, for heaven’s sake, since the then Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith – not one of nature’s more radical progressives – rejected honorary membership of the Carlton Club on the grounds that the Conservatives’ oldest gentlemen’s club denied full membership rights to female MPs. It took seven years of arm-twisting, but eventually the club surrendered, accepting that leaders couldn’t be seen publicly condoning its practices. Though perhaps “publicly” is the relevant word, given that some Garrick members seemingly didn’t see the problem until they were outed and exposed to female colleagues’ ire.
Simon Case, the head of the civil service, explained when challenged by the select committee chair Liam Byrne to justify his Garrick membership that he was trying to “make the change from within”. Sadly for the future of feminism, he has now resigned, which just leaves the task of reforming Whitehall from within. No doubt we’ll hear all about that when he appears before the Covid inquiry, which has shown keen interest in allegations of “macho posturing” and rank misogyny inside Downing Street.
Robert Chote, former head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, has also quit a club that neither the high-flying former Treasury civil servant Sharon White – AKA his wife – nor the probable next chancellor could currently join. Richard Moore, who as head of MI6 has led a diversity drive, also resigned, only to be branded a wimp by an anonymous Garrick member in the Daily Mail. The club, the unnamed correspondent huffed, is merely a place for men to “exchange ideas and learn from each other without being cancelled for having the “wrong opinion”.
Based on that description, the Garrick may not be knocked down in the rush if it ever does invite women to join, though it would be an interesting place for the equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, to continue her crusade against corporate diversity initiatives.
When women have so many bigger battles to fight, a large part of me admittedly struggles to care about a few old buffers snoozing in their armchairs, not least because the right to join them for a brandy in the library seems so oddly unappealing.
I can still remember the relief, as a young lobby reporter, when female MPs started pushing back against Westminster’s culture of evening boozing and schmoozing. I didn’t really want to spend my evenings cruising for stories in the beery fug of the Strangers’ Bar any more than they did; and doing business in the daytime left evenings free to see your real friends – or get home in time to see the kids while they were still awake.
But there was, and still is, a cost in politics to being deemed “not clubbable”, or unwilling to spend endless nights sucking up to people who might one day be useful. No matter how effective you are from nine to five, there was, and still is, a penalty in many professions to skipping the five to nine: that fuzzy, early-evening area of winding-down drinks after work, optional events and trading inside gossip.
For the problem with power is that it retreats. Force the door to the room where everything happens, and power slips away through a side door into a room you didn’t know existed. As the visible professional sphere becomes more accessible not just to women but to all those previously underrepresented, the value of these hidden spaces, exclusive to white men, may increase. It’s not that we’re necessarily desperate to get into your club. It’s more that we learned the hard way to be suspicious of men who want to keep us out.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
