After more than 140 years, Salt Lake City’s historic social club Alta Club has hired its first female general manager.

Ryann Wynn started in her role just six weeks ago, but she’s “very excited” about the historic nature of her appointment and what it means for the Alta Club.

“There is obviously an immense amount of pressure for being the first female general manager,” Wynn said, “It’s something that I think about often ... I feel very fortunate to be here, and I am already very passionate about this place and making it into the best version of itself.”

For its first century, the club did not allow women to join as members.

Wynn, a native of Heber City, attended the University of Utah and has a background in hospitality management. She’s also worked at The Chateaux Deer Valley.

“Having someone that has a completely outside perspective is great for the club [to] come up with kind of new ideas and a fresher perspective on how to move the club forward,” Wynn said.

Wynn said she’s always known of the Alta Club, but was approached by the club’s board to apply for the position.

The Alta Club opened in 1883, prior to Utah gaining statehood. Its 81 founding members did not include any men in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But as it quickly became a hub for Utah’s business community, it was a place where men of different faiths mixed.

But it wasn’t until 1987 that the club allowed female members to join — a change that didn’t come easily.

During the 1980s — a decade characterized by the tail end of the Women’s Liberation Movement — a woman named Megan Peters filed a lawsuit against the club focused on its state license to serve beer. She and her attorney, Brian Barnard, argued the club was discriminating against women and violating the Utah Civil Rights Act, according to Mapping SLC.

At first, the club chose to stopped serving beer. But under legal, social and economic pressure, it voted to allow women as members.

Before then, wives and widows could visit the club, but had to use a special door — the women’s entrance — and climb several flights of stairs to a room where they had to wait for a man to escort them.

Genevieve Atwood, Deedee Corradini and Annette P. Cumming were the first three female members.

“Of all the things I’ve done, I will always be remembered as the first woman member of the Alta Club,” Atwood told The Salt Lake Tribune in 2017. “It’s a symbol.”

[From The Tribune’s archives: 30 years ago today, Utah’s Alta Club admitted its first female member]

Kate Bradshaw, the mayor of Bountiful and director of government affairs at Holland & Hart, said the Alta Club has always been a part of her life. She’s a fourth-generation member and the first woman in her family to be a member.

Bradshaw has served on the club’s board twice. She was just 6 years old when the club started permitting female members.

“We’ve passed an era where we dress fancy for dinner, there’s no black tie, white tie dressing for dinner like we did in much earlier generations,” Bradshaw said. “So the club has to continue to hold in one hand tradition and the things that that make it the third place that people want to be and spend their free time, but also move and engage with the times.”

Bradshaw said bringing on a general manager like Wynn who can do both of those things is key.

There are currently four women on the board and 130 women are members, according to Wynn.

Wynn said she hopes in her new role she can bring the club back to its “glory days.”

“We are the oldest club in Utah, and it used to be something that we had a long-standing line and a wait list,” she said. “We do have a significant amount of membership currently, but it’s something that we’re always improving with the changing of the time.”

Wynn loves the community of the club, and its rich history, and now, she gets to be a part of it.

“With a club this historic, and all things that have happened here, the prominent members that we’ve had, it can seem a little intimidating and daunting,” she said. “But our longstanding members and new members that we have ... everyone is genuinely welcoming and they want to get to know you.”