Following NOW’s victory at the Plaza, places like the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills, the Berghoff bar in Chicago, and Heinemann’s Restaurant in Milwaukee, encountering complaints and picketing, also reversed their male-only policies. But other bars locked their doors or ordered their staff to ignore female customers. These owners dismissed the feminists as “troublemakers” and “zealots,” and drew upon the “common sense” notion that respectable women would have no interest in socially trespassing into the male domain.
Those against the feminist campaign were armed with an array of reasons for denying women equal access to accommodations. Some suggested that women lacked the ability to calculate the check and tip correctly, that bar crowds were too “rough” and boisterous for them, or that male-only spaces were sacred respites for politics and sports talk, where men could share “lewd stories” or “have a quiet beer and tell a few jokes.” The manager of Biltmore in Manhattan insisted that businessmen’s conversations were simply “not for women.” Bars were, in Hickey’s words, the “last stronghold of masculinity” in the early 1970s, an oasis for men during an historical moment marked by the transformation of gender norms. Government officials sometimes reinforced this notion: One Connecticut State Representative claimed that a bar was the only place a man could go “and not be nagged.”
- JSTOR Daily
