Masters golf: 12 women candidates for Augusta National membership

The Augusta National Golf Club has steadfastly refused to alter its all-male membership. But circumstances may soon cause the gender barrier to break, and if it does there are several women who might be good fits for the club.

Sandra Day O’Connor

Adele Starr/AP/File
In this 2004 file photo, US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor smiles after she received the Senator John Heinz Award for Greatest Public Service by an Elected or Appointed Official during a ceremony at the American Institute for Public Service Jefferson Awards in Washington, D.C.

O’Connor made history as the first female Supreme Court Justice when Ronald Reagan nominated her in 1981. Retired since 2006, she might not play much golf anymore, but she knows the game. O'Connor took it up mid-career when she was encouraged to play while visiting friends in Wisconsin.  She and Glen Nager, the first Supreme Court clerk she hired, were frequent playing partners. Nager went on to become president of the US Golf Association. Of O’Connor’s game, he once told the Washington Post: “She hits the ball disgustingly straight. There was a reason she was the center of the court all those years.”

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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