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Around the country, a number of such clubs have politely surrendered -- the Houston Club, for example, and the Detroit Athletic Club -- but others keep maneuvering with all the grace of frightened schoolboys. (Speaking of which, the Princeton University council last month asked New Jersey authorities whether Princeton's last two all-male eating clubs could escape going coed by severing all connections with the university, as several all-male clubs at Harvard have done.) Washington's splendiferous Cosmos Club, which boasts Woodrow Wilson and Oliver Wendell Holmes among its past members, has even tried (unsuccessfully) to require new members to sign a pledge that they will not try to change the club's bylaws, which limit membership to "men of accomplishment." Critics of the Cosmos' policies have formally asked the D.C. alcoholic beverage-control board to cancel the club's liquor license.
It was getting on toward 1 o'clock, and still the essayist, who is given to idly wondering, idly wondered: Is it really acceptable to go to lunch at the Millennium Club? He casually asked a colleague whether he was a member, and the colleague said he had been but had resigned. That seemed very high- toned and impressive, but the essayist is not a member, and it would seem excessive to join an organization solely to resign from it in protest. The colleague then explained that his wife had given him no peace on the subject, and he valued peace. So now would he go to lunch there if another member invited him? Sure. Would he go to lunch at a club that barred blacks? No. "What's the difference?" the essayist inquired. The colleague paused. "I don't know," he said.
These are small things, to be sure, and not a single sick or hungry child will feel better because the Millennium Club opens its doors to women. On the other hand, is life not made up of small things? Lots and lots of small things? And isn't there considerable truth in that old banality of Edmund Burke's about the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil being for good men to do nothing (he presumably meant good people or good individuals, but never mind -- the creation of aphorisms was simpler in Burke's day)?
So down with the Millennium Club and all its partners in crime! Far from having lunch there, let us march against it and wave our banners before its marble portals. Down with all discrimination! Equality for all! We demand justice!
"Wait a minute," said a woman who works down the hall. "I hope you're not going to be one of those people who try to argue that women have to let men into the Colony Club."
"Sure I am," said the essayist, all filled with revolutionary enthusiasm.
"But that's one of the most important discoveries of the women's movement," she said, "that women need to have some place where they can talk about their experiences."
"They can do that with men on the premises too," the essayist said. "I'm for desegregation in all things."
"No, they can't," said the woman who works down the hall.
"As a matter of fact," said the colleague who had resigned from the Millennium Club, "I'm enough of a libertarian to think that as long as a club is really private, it ought to be free to exclude anybody it wants, women or blacks or Greeks or people with red hair or whatever. Let them all start their own clubs."