Your wife’s book club probably isn’t made up of a large proportion of your country’s cultural, financial, and academic elites which are openly involved in politics.
This isn’t some dudes meeting up in a bowling alley or a local bar, but rather one of the places where politics get made for real.
It doesn’t have to be a bad thing; Belgium’s most prestigious university is a freemason project. But excluding women from such “soft power” exercises raises some alarm bells for me.