Petticoat Alley: London’s Forgotten Women’s Clubs

A post for my paid subscribers (I have to thank them somehow, for their kind patronage of this Substack newsletter), this was first published in ‘History Today’, issue 74:5 (May 2024), pp. 22-24.

Luncheon at the Lyceum Club, London, 22 March 1916. Left to right: Mrs. Hawkins (General Botha’s sister), Lady Frances Balfour, President of the Club, and Mrs. Parker (Lord Kitchener’s sister).

The recent controversy at the Garrick Club has shone a fresh light on the question of women being admitted to private members’ clubs. Yet the history of London clubs is not – as is often thought – as simple as men keeping women at bay.

London has long been the global ‘capital’ of social clubs, with a flourishing club culture encompassing over 600 such establishments from the 18^th century to the present (not including thousands of ‘spin-off’ institutions, from sports clubs to working men’s clubs). Other cities worldwide have seen many social clubs, but none has had the concentration of London, which had 400 clubs by their Edwardian heyday. But while the prevailing image of them is quintessentially masculine spaces, with ladies only admitted as guests on sufferance, this is not the case. The history of women in London clubs is a long one.

Seth Thévoz’s Clubland Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The first club with women members was launched in 1770 at 48 Pall Mall, making it older than all but three of today’s clubs. Ladies’ Boodle’s – otherwise known as ‘The Female Coterie’ – was a bold experiment in which women members could only be proposed by men, and men could only be proposed by women. It proved a short-lived experiment, though, closing by 1779.