Rotary and Women go together !

 

At its meeting last week Cromwell Rotary celebrated 30 years of having women in its club.  Rotary International was started in Chicago in 1905 as a men only business club but now welcomes women to its membership.  In this part of the country Cromwell Rotary very much led the way by inducting its first three women to the club in 1989.  They were Gill Adams, Shirley MacAllister and Shirley Howard.  However not only were they the first three women in the Cromwell Club, they were the first three women in any club in our District (the lower half of the South Island).  Shirley Howard is still an honorary member of the Cromwell Club and lives in Clyde.  Unlike Cromwell, many Clubs were slow to accept the change and in a number of cases lost male Rotary members who were not willing to accept the changes that Rotary International introduced. 

 

Guest speaker at the celebratory meeting last week was Jenny Scott.  Jenny joined Rotary in Gore in 1994, the first woman to be invited to do so.  She transferred to the Cromwell club in 1995 where not only was she warmly welcomed but became the club's second woman president in 1998.  During her address she talked about the challenges of still frequently being alone in a sea of men at Rotary gatherings back then.  She also read a lovely message from the club’s first woman president, Gill Adams, (1992) now living in Australia, who echoed Jenny's sentiments about how hard it was to break into the previously male only domain.  Again Cromwell scored a first as Gill was not only the first woman to be President in the Cromwell Club, she was also the first woman President in New Zealand.

 

In this colourful line up are Rotary Presidents  Bonnie Miller Perry (2016), Jennie Nicol (2003) Jean Morgan (2014), Jenny Scott (1998), Helen Wreford Dunbar (2009), and incoming presidents Pam Broadhead (July 2020) and Neroli McRae (July 2019).