NEW YORK — The #MeToo movement has swept across television and movie studios, investment banks and factory floors, fundamentally remaking the thinking around gender and harassment.
Has it also swept into a corner of one of the country’s biggest celebrations of Irish heritage?
For the first time since its founding shortly after the Revolutionary War, a group that puts on a formal dinner to raise money for charity just before the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City will allow women to attend.
Specifically, the Society of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in the City of New York is inviting “the wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, aunts, nieces and female cousins, friends and colleagues of our members” to its dinner at the New York Hilton.
It has taken only 235 years. And it has only been 30 years since a woman led the St. Patrick’s Day parade as grand marshal for the first time.
The Friendly Sons in New York was started to assist Irish immigrants, and the organization has remained fraternal in the three decades since the city pressured other all-male private clubs to admit women.
The Friendly Sons in New York is not officially connected with the St. Patrick’s Day parade on Fifth Avenue. The parade counts 182 affiliated associations, but not the Friendly Sons, which has participated in the St. Patrick’s Day parade only once as an organization (when soldiers from World War I were returning to civilian life 100 years ago).
The president of the Friendly Sons in New York, Kevin J. Rooney, announced the change in a recent letter to members. He did not respond to telephone calls or an email message last week. But in the letter, he framed the decision as an expansion of the group’s reach.
He also noted that as Irish immigration had declined in recent decades, the Friendly Sons had widened “its reach to assist all people, regardless of age, race, ethnicity, nationality or religion.”
So, he wrote, it “will again expand its reach, this time with regard to the audience it welcomes to the anniversary dinner,” and welcome women as guests.
“This ‘expansive’ approach is consistent with our history of supporting all people — especially women,” he wrote, adding that in the last decade, the society has given more than $2 million to “a wide variety of worthy organizations.” Beneficiaries include food pantries, homeless shelters, job counseling and support programs for veterans and scholarships for poor and middle-class families.
“In every case,” he wrote, “women have benefited from the society’s support.”
There are Friendly Sons groups in other cities, and they all operate independently. The oldest, in Philadelphia, has been more open to including women. In 2016, it admitted Anne Anderson, the Irish ambassador to the United States at the time, in its first class of 20 women.
Rooney, the president of the New York society, did not say in his letter whether his group had come under pressure to follow Philadelphia’s example or whether some members had become uncomfortable about continuing the men-only policy.
“History has caught up with them,” said one longtime member, recalling that when he joined the Friendly Sons in the 1980s, there were cigars at each place setting. The cigars were dropped in the ‘90s.
But perhaps there was an even more powerful motivation for allowing members to invite women to the dinner: boosting numbers, and revenue.
The longtime member, who insisted on anonymity, said attendance at the dinner declined sharply last year.
“A lot of people don’t want to go without their wives,” he said. “There are a lot of women, like my wife, who said, ‘This is about one of the most significant days of the year, and you want me to be home alone?'”
Coming just before St. Patrick’s Day, the Friendly Sons dinner does not have the political overtones of the Al Smith Dinner, which is also a white-tie gathering for charity that is held in late fall. It is usually an occasion for affable one-liners from politicians or, in election years, candidates.
Some Friendly Sons dinners do make news. Presidents have addressed the group, among them Harry S. Truman in 1948 and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, less than four months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the first Irish-Catholic elected president.
There were also lighter moments. In 1967, at the 183rd Friendly Sons dinner, Mayor John V. Lindsay and Raymond R. Guest, the United States’ ambassador to Ireland at the time, addressed the group. The mayor noted it was the first time that “both principal speakers at this gathering have been certifiable Protestants.”
“And, judging from the weather that blew into town” — a snowstorm — “I’m sure it will be a long time before the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick make that mistake again.”
The group’s name is a throwback to its colonial-era origins. Robert J. Reilly, president in 2004 and 2005, told the society in 2000 that the primary meaning of “friendly” in colonial America was charitable, not pleasant. (His speech is posted on the society’s website).
“Each ethnic group took care of their own,” Reilly said. The English had the St. George’s Society, the Scots had the St. Andrew’s Society, the Germans had the German Society.
“They provided blankets,” Reilly said. “They paid rent. They provided food.”
Now, the Friendly Sons provide money. The group’s filings to the IRS show that it has donated just over $2.3 million since 2009, from as much as $225,000 that year to as little as $131,100 in 2010. For the 12 months that ended on March 31 of last year, the figure was $210,000.
So a larger turnout — a turnout bolstered by allowing women to attend — could translate into more money to give away.
Unlike Manhattan clubs with the kinds of gemlike hangouts that the Gilded Age architect Stanford White turned into an art form, the Friendly Sons do not have a clubhouse of their own. Their office, funnily enough, is in the Women’s National Republican Club building in midtown Manhattan, itself a landmark that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
But the women will only be guests at the Friendly Sons dinner. Reilly’s statement announcing an end to a tradition that had become a relic, if not an albatross, did not say whether the Friendly Sons would admit women as members.
That might require a name change.
Anderson, the former ambassador, suggested it several years ago when she told The Irish Times, after a meeting with the Friendly Sons chapter in Washington, that she would “love to see them evolve toward a new title.”
Her suggestion? The Friendly Sons and Daughters of St. Patrick.
The issue of men-only get-togethers came up again last week, when Anderson was quoted as saying that she was “disappointed” by the Irish prime minister’s response to the idea that Irish diplomats should stop attending events run by all-male Irish-American groups. The prime minister, Leo Varadkar, told The Irish Times that skipping men-only gatherings in the United States could lead to a “double standard” if Irish diplomats continued to attend them elsewhere — at the Vatican, in Muslim countries or with lesbian and gay groups.
It is unusual for a former diplomat to disagree publicly, but Anderson did just that in a radio interview in Dublin on Friday. “I don’t think these are appropriate parallels to draw,” she said.
On Saturday, Anderson suggested that Friendly Sons groups that had not admitted women could do so by 2021, the 250th anniversary of the Philadelphia branch. (The New York group is younger, by 14 years.)
St. Patrick’s Day “should be the most inclusive day on our calendar,” she said in an interview. “What does it say if these enormous dinners are men only? You’re making invisible the contributions of women, generations of Irish women.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.