Muirfield finally admits women members, begrudgingly enters 21st century

Muirfield members, unhappy that their centuries-old exclusion of women from the inner sanctums of their sacred Scottish links clique excluded them from hosting future British Open Championships, finally on Tuesday voted to allow women to join the old boys club.

With 80.2 percent of those casting ballots voting to enter the 21st century and admit women, that leaves some 20 percent of the constituency still dragging their knuckles about entering the 21st century. Too bad for those neanderthals, since only two-thirds of eligible voters were needed to allow women more than guest or visitor status.

Doing the right thing was a long time coming for the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, which last May beat back a similar attempt to allow women members for the first time since the Honourables were established in 1744. That result forced the R&A to withdraw Muirfield’s eligibility to stage the British Open.

The second vote brought the club back into the rotation for the Open, which it has hosted 16 times.

“In light of today’s decision by the Honourable Company we can confirm that Muirfield will become a venue for The Open once again,” R&A chief executive Martin Slumbers said in a statement. “Muirfield has a long and important history of hosting The Open, and with today’s announcement that will continue. It is extremely important for us in staging one of the world’s great sporting events that women can become members at all of our host clubs. Muirfield is a truly outstanding Open venue and we very much look forward to taking the Championship back there in future.”

Don’t expect Scotland’s version of Condoleezza Rice to storm the castle just yet, though, as the Honourables captain Henry Fairweather told Golf Digest that the waiting list for membership for both genders is two to three years. Muirfield — the last of the Open courses to admit women members — is not expected back in the rota until 2022 or 2023.

By then, perhaps we’ll have an idea about exactly how welcoming Muirfield will be to half the population, though The Times’ Alyson Rudd makes an excellent case for waiting to see how things shake out before rewarding the Honourables with an Open slot.

“Let us discover what it is like to be a woman applying for membership. Let us find out if the same rules, no matter how quirky or antiquated, apply to women. And once women have navigated their way through the long membership process, let us see how welcome they are made to feel. Let us see if certain rooms are out of bounds or if at certain unwritten-rule- men-only-brandy-supping times, the lounge goes quiet when a woman walks in,” Rudd wrote. “And if Muirfield has no such hidden boundaries, if women can wander at will, relaxed, happy, not patronized, welcomed as equals and not through gritted teeth, well, only then can Muirfield stage its beloved Open.”