For an example of a member of the fairer sex getting her own back, there was an account of an American lady flouting the rules at Royal Troon by fooling the then secretary – it could have been Colin Montgomerie’s father, who held the position for many years – into thinking she was a man. She dressed in men’s clothing and topped off her outfit with a handsome tweed cap.
If there are wholesale changes, golfers of the future will almost certainly want to know how such discrimination ever came about. Some at least will be regaled with the story of the Fishwives of Musselburgh in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 
These good women would play along with everyone else on the Links of Musselburgh and, since the fish baskets they used to carry would weigh three times as much as a tour professional's golf bag, it is not unreasonable to speculate that they hit the ball as far as the men.
True or false, the subject would have been bound to get a mention as the men defected to their all-male clubs, starting with Bruntsfield and Muirfield, which hosts next year's Open Championship.
The great male amateurs of the Victorian era advised that women should stick to putting and, when the women rebelled and started to play for real, they were warned that to swing above shoulder height could only have an adverse effect on their reputations. On much the same tack, when word reached the noted amateur and writer Horace Hutchinson that the women were planning to start a Ladies’ Golf Union, he decreed that it could never work and that women were neither temperamentally nor physically suited to the rigours of the game.
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