Jaeger,
Back in 2003 David Owen wrote a very interesting editorial for Golf Digest at the height of the Martha Burk activity. It is called "The Case for All-Male Golf Clubs", I'm sure you could find it online.
The piece included an interview with Vincent Solano. Direct excerpt:
The state with the most all-male golf clubs, for some reason, is Illinois, which has four of them. I recently visited the newest of the four, Black Sheep Golf Club, which is situated on a rolling, treeless parcel of exurban farmland about an hour west of downtown Chicago. The clubhouse, a simple white barn, sits on a rise near the center of the property.
The decision to exclude women from Black Sheep was an economic one. "Our idea was to form a club where the emphasis would be on golf," Vincent Solano, the club president, told me. "We wanted to keep the expense down, and to charge only enough to cover the cost, and to have just 200 members so that you can play golf any time that you want to. We don't have a restaurant. We have a shower, a bathroom, a bar, a place to sit, and a golf course." To attract a significant number of women, he said, he would have needed to add expensive amenities, a full social calendar and many more employees--and even with those things, he is certain, the response would have been limited. "Believe me," he said, "if there were a hundred women who would join a club like this, we would have women. But there's no market for it. We would never find enough women to join to justify the cost of providing facilities for them, even as guests."
In 1988, Solano started a different kind of golf club, called Royal Fox, which was the first private golf club in the Chicago area to permit women to join on their own, as full voting members rather than as spouses. The response was under-whelming. "Very few women applied, or even asked about applying," he told me. Today, Royal Fox has roughly 275 members, of whom six are women.
"Today, we hear the word `discrimination,' and we fall to the ground," Solano said. "That's because we immediately think of race, and we know that's wrong. That word is poison, but it tells a story without the facts."