What Golf Taught me About Being a Woman in America

By

Allie Lane

I have to admit, I never thought I would learn anything from watching golf. In fact, I’ve spent most of my life considering the time I’ve spent watching PGA events with my Dad as minutes and hours I’ll just never get back. This weekend, though, I learned something from golf, and it was nothing good. The Masters was on; the top men of the golf world were teeing off under the Georgia sun and everything was green. Panoramic shots of the verdant loveliness played behind the CBS Sports theme as it was announced that the 76^th Annual Masters was sponsored by IBM among other companies. This just washed over me. I’m an American kid who’s used to athletics being fused with big business.

“Yeah, I wonder what they’re going to do,” my mom said when the IBM logo came on the screen.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, IBM has been sponsoring the Masters for a long time, and it’s traditional that every year the president of IBM gets invited to join the club at Augusta. Only now, the president of IBM is a woman and Augusta doesn’t allow women to be members.”

“What?” I blinked several times in disbelief. This was 2012. “Women aren’t allowed to play?”

“No,” my mother clarified. “They can play there. They just aren’t allowed to be members.”

“That’s ridiculous. How can they do that?” I raged from the couch.

My mother shrugged. “It’s a private club full of Southern gentlemen who want it their way.”

The whole thing astounded me, and I pride myself on being a realist who is very hard to astound. I could not believe that something so heinously discriminatory was going on in the 21^st century. A part of me couldn’t even believe that the PGA or companies like IBM were tying themselves to a place like that, but as I thought about it, as I watched men in polo shirts stroll across immaculate fairways, I realized I shouldn’t have been.

I experienced a similar state of surprise when contraception popped up as a hot button issue on the political scene not long ago. I knew that every conservative politician was almost obligated to say they would attempt to overturn Roe vs. Wade, but the idea that birth control shouldn’t be covered by insurance and the rhetoric that said contraception was a societal evil seemed incomprehensible to me. Where had this come from? For as long as I was aware of such things, it had seemed that contraception was a thing American society had accepted. Of course, certain religions spoke out against it, some conservative families I knew disavowed it, but I never thought it was a right women were ever in danger of losing in this day and age. These were the problems of my mother’s generation, weren’t they? Aside from individually held prejudices and the lingering pay gap, women in American were basically equal, weren’t they?

That’s where I was wrong. 

My ignorance, I suppose, was a result of the environment I grew up in. I was raised by two moderate, middle class parents who worked in education for most of my life. My mother was always frank about puberty and sexuality when I was young, and, as I grew older, told me stories of how she debated abortion with male friends in the seventies and nearly always won. The same expectations for chores and behavior were placed on both my older brother and me. I was raised a Christian, but in a liberal protestant congregation with a female pastor. Apparently some of the more conservative churches in the area thought we were a dubious, blasphemous cell who preached that God was a woman. We were not. Even on the playground, I was never excluded from any game because I was a girl. I was never picked last for any team. Quite simply, I had never encountered any prejudice, so I assumed there was really very little downside to being a girl in modern American society. 

That belief held until I heard pundits saying that by expecting to have birth control coverage, women were consequently expecting to be paid for sex, until I heard about Augusta, where women still aren’t allowed to be members. 

To add irony to insult, this revelatory discovery of golfing discrimination came on the heels of reading an article on college applications, which noted that it was harder for girls to gain acceptance into institutions than for boys with equal qualifications. Since a majority of those applying for and receiving college degrees are now girls, a higher percentage of them are actually being turned away in favor of male applicants. Because girls are now, on average, performing better in school, many post secondary institutions seem to think that the American male needs a leg up, needs to be given a chance against all those uber-intelligent females. How, in a country where there is still a glaring gender pay gap, where certain colleges have been ruled hostile environments for women, where the female reproductive system is a political football, where literal boys clubs like Augusta still exist, could females have possibly gained something like an unfair advantage? 

It seems like the American woman is being squeezed at both ends. 





Allie Lane is a soon-to-be graduate of the University of New Hampshire with degrees in English and German. Her main academic interests are creative writing and literary translation. She grew up in Derry, New Hampshire, enjoys books, movies and the outdoors. She has, on occasion, been referred to as a Good Egg.