... to be windbagged...

When you call someone a "windbag" it usually means that they talk too much about something tiresome.

I'm guessing that the reading Horse and Hound by the fire is typically an activity where only men partake and women are excluded.

So I suppose that women who are "rabid equalizers" would want the opportunity to join the old geezers for the equal opportunity to be bored to death by discussing Horse and Hound.

Maybe...

"Women have made great strides in opening doors previously closed to them because of their gender, but some women won't be happy until they are admitted to every club, even the ones they don't particularly want to join."

I'm making a lot of assumptions but that's what I think the sentence means.

I can't help work out the sentence means - it's gibberish to me - but I can report that at least as many men as women read Horse and Hound. The activity is at least as characteristic of "middle-aged trouts" or "old bats" (those are both female designations in British English, by the way) as it is of "old geezers". So it certainly can't refer to women invading some previously male preserve.

Fansy--

Welcome to A2K.



In the States women complain about Old Boy's Clubs. In England, these clubs still exist. Women are not admitted to membership--in fact women are allowed as guests only during very limited hours and only in certain rooms.

For many men--who are often elderly men--the clubs function as a Home Away from Home. They can have lunch, and then read newspapers and all sorts of periodicals in rooms with leather chairs and cheerful coal fires.

The speaker is downgrading the advantages of club memberships. Sure, a young member is in danger of being bored by elderly members. Non-members (most men and all women) don't run this risk--but they also don't have a chance to meet and mingle with powerful men who have made their marks in Politics, Finance or Trade.

A windbag is a person (usually male) whose conversation is forceful, but all the same, empty air. I think the author also meant to play with the concepts of "windbag" and "sandbag" (to hit over the head).