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| Darla Moore and Condoleezza Rice |
The home of the Masters, under increasing criticism the last decade because of its all-male membership, invited former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and South Carolina financier Darla Moore to become the first women in green jackets when the club opens for a new season in October.
Both women accepted.
The
move likely ends a debate that intensified in 2002 when Martha Burk of the
National Council of Women’s Organizations urged the club to include women among
its members. Former club chairman Hootie Johnson stood his ground, even at the
cost of losing Masters television sponsors for two years, when he famously said
Augusta National might one day have a woman in a green jacket, “but not at the
point of a bayonet.”
Augusta
National, which opened in December 1932 and did not have a black member until
1990, is believed to have about 300 members. While the club until now had no
female members, women were allowed to play the golf course as guests, including
on the Sunday before the Masters week began in April.
The
issue of female membership never went away, however, and it resurfaced again
this year after Virginia Rometty was appointed chief executive of IBM, one of
the Masters’ corporate sponsors. The previous four CEOs of Big Blue had all
been Augusta National members, leading to speculation that the club would break
at least one tradition — membership for the top executive of IBM or a men-only
club.
Moore,
58, first rose to prominence in the 1980s with Chemical Bank, where she became
the highest-paid woman in the banking industry. She is vice president of
Rainwater, Inc., a private investment company founded by her husband, Richard
Rainwater. She was the first woman to be profiled on the cover of Fortune
Magazine, and she made a $25 million contribution to her alma mater, South
Carolina, which renamed its business school after her.
Rice, 57, was the national security
adviser under former President George W. Bush and became secretary of state in
his second term. The first black woman to be a Stanford provost in 1993, she
now is a professor of political economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of
Business. Rice recently was appointed to the U.S. Golf Association’s nominating
committee.
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