Rotary Flashback 3
Rotary Flashback 3
written by Bob Dodds
In 1992-93 I served as President of a Rotary Club with 115 members with a demographic of many members in the 35 to 45 year old age range, most with families. Several years before that, Rotary in North America had finally allowed women to be in Rotary. We had a cadre of 15 to 20 very active members in our Club who were adamantly opposed to having women in Rotary and had pledged to leave our club and start another if a woman became a member of our Club. Every in-coming President dreaded the possibility that the first woman in our Club would happen in their year.
It happened in my year. I simply treated it as a non-event and welcomed her as any other male Rotarian would have been welcomed. To the credit of the cadre of 15 to 20 members, in the true spirit of Rotary, they reversed their stand and felt that it was not fair to the first woman member to be the only female in the Club and they became the biggest advocates to find more women members, something at which they were successful.
I can just hear the women readers of this Rotary Flashback shaking their heads and thinking “typical male troglodytes” but there is another side to this story. The wives of Rotary members were generally tolerant of their husbands being away from their families for breakfast, lunch (there were 3 Rotary Clubs in this town and the town was of the size that one could go home for lunch) or dinner since they were only out with a bunch of other men. Much of the resistance to having women in Rotary came from the wives of the male members. Most wives believe in their hearts that their husbands are equivalent to “dumb slabs of meat” when dealing with women and these “dumb slabs of meat” were now about to be exposed at Rotary meetings to intelligent, wily women with professional jobs - their husbands simply wouldn’t have a chance.
As Paul Harvey, the famous US radio personality would have said in his sonorous voice “now you know the rest of the story”.