Martha Burk takes a swing - protests men-only policy at Augusta National home of the Masters Golf Tournament

Progressive, The, June, 2003 by Andrea Lewis

This year's Masters tournament has come and gone, but Martha Burk and her cause have not vanished. "Today, we are protesting with placards," she said, as the tournament got under way. "Tomorrow, women will be protesting with their pocketbooks."

Burk has been leading the fight to end the men-only membership rule at Augusta National Golf Club. For years, I'd seen William "Hootie" Johnson preside over the Masters, acting every bit the Southern gentleman. But last July, Burk cracked Hootie's folksy facade.

"We have been contacted by Martha Burk, Chair of the National Council of Women's Organizations (NCWO), and strongly urged to radically change our membership," Johnson announced. "She suggested that NCWO's leadership 'discuss this matter' with us. We want the American public to be aware of this action right from the beginning. We have advised Dr. Burk that we do not intend to participate in such backroom discussions."

Most of NCWO's short letter, written by Burk, seemed tame in comparison. "Our member groups are very concerned that the nation's premiere golf event, the Masters, is hosted by a club that discriminates against women by barring them from membership," the letter stated.

From that time on, for the weeks and months leading up to this year's Masters tournament, the most recognizable face on the feminist frontline wasn't Gloria Steinem or Naomi Wolf or Alice Walker. It was Martha Burk. As Associated Press sports writer Paul Newberry wrote, "[Burk] might be the most symbolic female in the American sports world since tennis player Billie Jean King in 1973. That's when, in the so-called Battle of the Sexes, King defeated Bobby Riggs in an exhibition match at the dawning of the women's movement."

Much like the watershed "Battle of the Sexes," the campaign to address sexism at Augusta National began rather innocently.

"It wasn't really designed to bring it to the public attention," Burk told me during a phone interview a few weeks before the Masters. "When we wrote to them it was a private letter, and we intended for it to remain that way. We had read about the discrimination in USA Today, so it was already in the media. We had read that Lloyd Ward--who was at that time the CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee and an African American man who's a member of Augusta--was willing to work from the inside to get the policy changed. So our board decided to just write a letter to Augusta and copy it to Ward in an effort to help leverage those inside advocates. The club decided to make the letter public in a rather inflammatory press release saying that we had them at the point of a bayonet, we wanted a trophy in our trophy case, and lots of that sort of rhetoric."

Johnson maintained a studied silence on the subject for a while after that. But as the tournament date approached, Johnson began to offer more details on his position. Tiger Woods, after being pressured to take a stance, let it be known that he opposes Augusta's current membership policy. Johnson's reply basically was that Tiger should stay in his place. "I won't tell Tiger how to play golf if he doesn't tell us how to run our private club," he said. Johnson also indicated that Augusta would likely have a woman member at some point, but that it would be on a timeline of the club's choosing. But by the time tournament week arrived, Johnson was singing a different and much more strident tune: "If I dropped dead right now, our position will not change on this issue. It's not my issue alone. Single gender [association] is an important fabric of the American scene."

Burk actually offered qualified agreement on that point. "It depends on the club," she tells me. "If it's a Friday night poker group, of course there's a difference. That's clearly a private association, and we hold those values dear in this country for women and men. But when you're holding a public event, as they are, you're raking in millions of dollars from the public, you're on the public airwaves, it's an entirely different thing. And their membership is composed of the CEOs of America's largest corporations so this is not about a few friends getting together on the back nine. This is about power and keeping people out."

Burk had hit a nerve. Was she surprised by the vehement negative response she immediately received not just from Hootie Johnson but by many in the general public? "Well, yes and no. When you work on behalf of women's rights for nearly thirty years, as I have, you've pretty much been called everything and accused of everything. I am surprised that mere equality and the right to be part of a club whose membership includes America's largest corporations does bring the kind of hate mail that we're getting."

Burk's thirty years of fighting for women's rights have covered a lot of territory. She grew up in Tyler, Texas, in a relatively affluent and golf-loving family. Her mother was a college graduate, and both of Burk's parents were partners in the family business, which was a retail clothing store. Early on, Burk had aspirations of becoming a marine biologist. Unfortunately, she came of age during the gender-restrictive 1950s when women's career choices were limited to three major options: teacher, nurse, and secretary. Burk got married and had two kids before she turned twenty-five but eventually earned a degree in psychology.