Carter and Nancy Seear. It did not admit women as full members until 1976, although this did still make it the first major London club to admit women, while many other such clubs did not admit women until the 1990s or 2000s (and several still do not). The next major London club to admit women was the Reform Club, in 1981. The club's first full women members in 1976 were Christina Baron and Joyce Arram. In 2016, the Club elected its first female Chairman, Janet Berridge. Dress code When the club was originally launched in 1882, like every other London club of the era it had no prescriptive dress code. In 1888, a simple requirement was introduced that "No member shall appear in any public rooms of the Club in a dressing gown, slippers, or other deshabille." Beyond that, the club's only dress code was a request in the Regulations that members "dress and conduct themselves in a manner consistent with civilised standards", but precisely how members chose to observe that remained a matter of considerable personal interpretation. Indeed, the club's first official history, in 1925, noted that an unusual feature of the NLC was the way in which it enjoyed far more casual dress than other London clubs, with members turning up in their working clothes, and it singled out, "the practical tabooing of evening dress, which assisted in securing the attendance of the House of Commons and Press Gallery men for at least part of the social evening." This absence of any prescriptive dress code remained the club's modus operandi from 1882 until 1979, when the Club's flurry of recent scandals led the General Committee to impose a strict jacket-and-tie dress code for men for the very first time, emulating the jacket-and-tie dress codes introduced in other London clubs in the 1950s, which the NLC had previously held out against. No vote of the membership was held on the new dress code. This strict jacket-and-tie dress code remained in place for 40 years after the General Committee's 1979 decision, although a 2005 review led the club to permit men to remove their jackets on the club's terrace. In May 2018, the Club's Annual General Meeting voted by 49 to 36 in favour of a trial relaxation of the dress code in July and August of that year, removing the jacket-and-tie requirement from every part of the club except