Oust Women?

A prominent national group moving to expel women? In this liberated age?

That is happening in the Jaycees, the big (377,500 members) organization of young (18 to 35) boosters dedicated to community service and what they call "leadership training." Though they began admitting blacks in the 1940s and seeking blue-collar recruits in the 1960s, the Jaycees have always relegated women to non-voting associate memberships or auxiliaries called Jayceettes.

Three years ago, prodded by some big-city chapters that are more used to career women than the small-town outfits that account for most of the nearly 9,000 Jaycee clubs, the headquarters in Tulsa, Okla., grudgingly decided to allow full membership for females on a test basis in Massachusetts, Alaska and Washington, B.C. The experiment was a hit with many of the chapters concerned. But not, alas, with the 4,500 delegates who attended the Jaycees convention in Atlantic City, N.J., last June. They voted 3 to 1 to ban women, and newly elected Jaycees President Barry Kennedy, 32, a Nebraska dealer in pigs, cattle and other livestock, ordered the 120 chapters that had admitted females to purge them by Dec. 1.

Since then the boosters have been doing much brawling, mostly over what urban-area Jaycees see as the organization's dominant rural conservatism. Massachusetts Jaycees officials have voted to battle the no-women order with a lawsuit, even though a 1974 ruling by a federal appeals court upheld the group's right to ban women. Leaders of the all-male Louisville chapter, largest in the organization (735 members), have called for admission of females. So, less surprisingly, has the Chicago chapter (234 men, 136 women), which withdrew from the national organization in protest. Complains Chapter President Joan Petranovich, a secretary: "The Jaycees are hypocritical. Here is a group trying to help people that spends its time trying to trip each other up."

Some Jaycees worry that the organization's stand could cost it much of the financial support it has traditionally had from businesses. But unless the Jaycees' executive board overrules him, Pig Man Kennedy promises, chapters that keep their women will lose their charters. Says he: "Bylaws are bylaws."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.