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Shirley Leung

It took 108 years, but the Harvard Club of Boston has its first female president

“If we’re going to sustain the club... we have to reflect the Harvard of today,” said Karen Van Winkle.Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff

The mahogany is still there, and so are the bow ties, but try not to call the Harvard Club of Boston an old boys’ club anymore.

In a sure sign of change, members of the 108-year-old alumni group on Monday elected Karen Van Winkle its first female president.

Yeah, it’s about time. It was way back in 2007 that Harvard University trustees deemed a woman good enough to run the world’s greatest institution of learning.

It just shows that change can be slow, even for those who are smart enough to get into Harvard. The university now awards about half of its degrees to female students, yet at the local club men outnumber women 3 to 1.

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That was also the gender breakdown on the Cambridge campus when Van Winkle arrived in the fall of 1976 as part of the first fully integrated class of men and women. She could afford Harvard, thanks to a four-year club scholarship named after comedian Amy Poehler’s great aunt, Virginia, who was a longtime employee.

Van Winkle’s priority during her three-year term as president is to make the club more welcoming to women and families. That means upgrading the women’s locker room, designing kid-friendly programs, and maybe even offer baby-sitting.

“If we’re going to sustain the club and we’re going to add to our membership, we have to reflect the Harvard of today,” said Van Winkle over lunch recently at one of the club’s dining rooms on the 38th floor of One Federal Street.

So as exclusive as Hahvahd sounds, the club actually wants to be inclusive. Membership, which hovers at a little over 5,000, is down from nearly 8,000 three decades ago. (The Harvard Club of New York City has more than 20,000 members.)

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People used to join private clubs primarily as a place to eat, network, and work out. The annual dues at the Harvard Club range from $200 (for a student) to $2,700 (full resident membership). The club accepts anyone with a Harvard degree and offers associate memberships to grads from other schools such as Boston University and Northeastern.

The membership roster reads like a who’s who of the business community: developers Don Chiofaro and Ron Druker; Stephen Kay of Goldman Sachs, PR maven Geri Denterlein, powerful lawyers Larry DiCara and Karen Green, and concessionaire king Joe O’Donnell.

But with the rise of a gourmet restaurant scene and arrival of fancy gyms in Boston, private clubs have to fight for relevance.

“She is particularly geared toward recruiting the next generation of the Harvard Club,” said alumna Katherine Craven, Babson College’s chief administrative officer and a club board member. “It’s a very bricks and mortars organization . . . young people don’t do that any more.”

The Harvard Club of Boston is run independently of the university and has a full-time staff operating two facilities — one downtown and one in the Back Bay on Commonwealth Avenue, which recently underwent renovations.

Van Winkle, 58, has been a member of the club since 1981, three years after it started to accept women. For more than a decade, she has served on the board, and the club president functions as its chair. Van Winkle, who got her degree in psychology, makes a living as vice president of business development and marketing at Creative Office Pavilion, an office furniture dealer in Boston.

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Van Winkle grew up in Cambridge and Harvard was like her backyard. Neither of her parents went to college — her mom was a secretary, her dad worked for the telephone company — but they instilled in their four children the value of an education.

Van Winkle attended an all-girls Catholic high school in Brighton, but when she told the nuns she wanted to apply to Harvard, they tried to dissuade her.

“The nuns were like you can’t do that,” she recalled. “You have to go to Regis or BC.”

Van Winkle got in, and her financial aid package included the club’s Virginia Poehler scholarship. The award, given to a woman who exhibits leadership abilities, covered about $2,200 a year. That was significant given that Harvard — room, board, and tuition — cost about $8,500 by the time she graduated.

Van Winkle’s ties to Harvard run deeper. Her grandmother worked as a maid at Harvard Business School, and one day, while cleaning a room, she met another Irish maid. The two learned that one had an adult son, the other an adult daughter; a match was made.

“A couple of weeks later my parents met at a St. Mary’s dance,” said Van Winkle.

Her parents, of course, were proud but made sure Harvard never went to her head. During Van Winkle’s freshman year, she took a job with a dorm crew because it paid the most but required cleaning bathrooms.

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Her assignment: Currier House, where Caroline Kennedy was living.

Under the family Christmas tree that year, Van Winkle found a toilet brush, spray-painted gold.

“If you are going to clean Caroline Kennedy’s bathroom,” her parents told her, “you are going to have a gold-plated toilet brush.”

Today Van Winkle is also a proud Harvard parent; her 21-year-old son, Christopher, is a sophomore.

Beyond women, Van Winkle wants to offer full membership status to more alums from other schools; the club recently extended that privilege to MIT. Currently Harvard graduates make up about two-thirds of the club membership.

“Times are changing,” she said. “We never want to lose the exclusivity that a lot of the members love about the Harvard Club, because of their Harvard affiliation, but I think we benefit tremendously.”

This old boys’ club may never be the same.


Shirley Leung is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at shirley.leung@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @leung.