The long-awaited arrival of warmer temperatures has boat owners heading to the region’s yacht clubs and marinas to clean and prep their vessels for cruising. At the Westerly Yacht Club, some new members have changed the face of this spring’s boating season preparations. It is a change long overdue.

In July, the yacht club joined every other East Coast yacht club and voted to allow female members. Before that vote, the club was happy to allow wives and daughters only as far as the likes of party planning committees or into the kitchen to help execute social events. Women could be non-voting associate members if married to a full member. No divorced women, single women or lesbians allowed.

At least some women are thrilled with the yacht club’s decision. Carol Coburn said the club has been a part of her family for several generations and she is happy to have been admitted as a full, voting member.

Even as the club’s July vote − one month after a roundly criticized vote to continue denying women memebership − brought it at least partially out of its cocoon of Victorian mores, some notes of hesitancy about the move remain. Commodore Shaun Tine professed to not know exactly how many women have been admitted as members when asked for a number recently. He didn’t know off the top of his head, he contended.

Given that the vote to admit women as voting members came only after a barrage of intense public embarrassment, negative press accounts both locally and nationally, angry letters to the editor and social media commentary, financial loss after several groups cancelled yacht club event bookings and the threat of an ACLU lawsuit, excuse us if we find it hard to believe the commodore doesn’t have a fix on the number of females admitted over the nine months since the vote. It’s probably not many. After the July vote, the club reported receiving two applications from women.

Remember, too, that many yacht club members defended the no-female policy by saying admitting single women would jeopardize the so-called family atmosphere at the club. In these members’ minds, it apparently had been OK for decades to shun even widows and divorced women whose husbands and ex-husbands had been full members. Any woman without a man by her side simply was viewed as unfit for membership.

We are happy that Coburn and other women like her with soft spots in their hearts for the Westerly Yacht Club and its importance to their families, are slowly being accepted as voting members there. We remain unconvinced, however, that the provincial and, yes, discriminatory attitudes are truly gone from the Watch Hill Road clubhouse.

Given how reluctant the Westerly Yacht Club was about accepting women, it would be no surprise if they are not flocking in to become members. We suspect most female boat lovers prefer to spend their time and money at the many other yacht clubs where they are truly valued and have been treated as equals for a long time.