Kiwanis Opens Membership to Women

Kiwanis International, a service organization with clubs all over the world, ended a 72-year men-only tradition in a matter of minutes Tuesday with an overwhelming vote to let its 8,200 clubs admit women.

“I’m delighted and relieved,” incoming president Tony Kaiser said after the vote. “It’s time to put this controversy behind us and get on with the real business of the service club movement.”

Well over two-thirds of the 5,600-plus delegates stood up when asked if they favored ending the ban on women members, and erupted into cheers as Kiwanis International President Frank DiNoto announced the result.

“It was overwhelming,” DiNoto said later. “It did surprise me. We had anticipated (having to take) a ballot vote on it.”

The Supreme Court ruled May 4 in a California case that states may force service organizations such as Rotary International to accept women as members. Three years ago the court made a similar ruling in a Minnesota case involving the Jaycees.

The Jaycees began admitting women in 1984 and Lions International voted last week to allow women to join.

Last year at the Kiwanis convention in Houston, 47% of the delegates voted to remove the requirement that members be men--up from 23% the year before in Toronto.

DiNoto said the court rulings had some impact on the massive majority that supported the change this year, but were not the decisive factor. “There were more and more clubs that were admitting women to Kiwanis clubs anyway. It swelled from our membership,” he said.

Kiwanis membership is by invitation only and will continue to be so for men and women. Forty U.S. clubs in 16 states already had admitted women members in violation of the Kiwanis constitution and by-laws.

Eleanor Smeal, president of the National Organization for Women, said the Kiwanis decision “sounds the death knell for male-only economic organizations.”

She said the integration of women into “dinosaurs such as the Cosmos Club (in Washington) and the Bohemian Club (in San Francisco) and indeed the Congress . . . is just a matter of time and we intend to speed up the time line.”

No one mounted an argument against the new rule, which was endorsed by the Kiwanis board of trustees and board of governors.

Kiwanis is a community service organization with 315,000 members.

Kiwanis is an Indian word that means “We have a good time--we make noise.”