On gender equity, Royal Birkdale’s ahead by a century

Every British Open golf course has its own atmosphere, comprised of antiquated custom, salt-heavy air, and local varieties of ankle-clutching grasses.

In the case of Royal Birkdale, you find this peculiarly odd element in the club’s history: skirts.

Birkdale has been admitting female members since 1890, earlier than its brethren clubs by more than a century and a quarter.

It’s impossible to overstate just how sexist golf has been through the centuries. The Society of St. Andrews Golfers, founded in 1754, started admitting women in 2015. Muirfield’s members flatly refused to mingle with women until this year, arguing their presence would slow play and upset their “luncheon arrangements,” and capitulated only when threatened with removal from the British Open rotation.

Susan Reed, former editor of Golf For Women magazine, jokes, “In golf, it’s 1956.”

But at Birkdale, women were accepted from the first. The club was opened in 1889 by a handful of Lancashire gentry, who voted unanimously in favour of allowing women to play three days a week. Within months they approved the admission of 14 female members. Why? According to Birkdale’s club historian and memorabilia chairman John Rostron, the reason was, as ever, economics. The women of Birkdale had money, and standing.

Birkdale sits in Southport, a handsome spa town that became popular in the 1790s as a destination for saltwater cures among the wealthy merchants of Liverpool. The men commuted to Liverpool each day by rail. Left behind with nothing to do, were women.

As the town prospered, the population of wealthy women grew, inheriting estates and incomes from fathers and husbands. In Southport, the number of female taxpayers was double that in the rest of England.

The first important tournament hosted by Birkdale, in 1909, was the Ladies British Open match-play championship, won by Dorothy Iona Campbell. When the club captain presented the medal and trophy, he said the ladies “made the members miserable at the thought of their own shortcomings.” As for himself, he was “prepared to sell his clubs and play marbles.”

At this British Open, men will tread over ground where the roots of the game are as ancient for women as for them.