In this case, an eight year old girl named Victoria Isbister, in 1977, brought a class action lawsuit against the Boy's Club of Santa Cruz, CA for discriminating against her and others like her on the basis of sex, by excluding them from using the Club. The Boy's Club is "unique in northern Santa Cruz County in the range and low cost of the recreational facilities and programs it provides under one roof. No single program or facility open to girls offers a similar range of activities at similar cost." With the ACLU's support, she argued that the Club's policies violated the Unruh Civil Rights Act (Civ. Code, § 51), which "guarantees every person in California 'full and equal' access to 'all business establishments of every kind whatsoever.' The question that the court considered here is whether the Club is one of the 'business establishments' covered by the Act. The Club was established by a trust which involved no gender-related restrictions. However, the donors wished to restrict membership to boys in order to "combat delinquency." The court writes, however, "... delinquency affects substantial numbers of girls."

The court concluded that the Club is, in fact, covered by the Unruh Act, and justify this conclusion by writing: "There is no substantial evidence on this record that the Club's programs, services, and facilities are unsuitable for girls, or that inclusion of both sexes in these programs would diminish their value or effectiveness. Nor is there proof that female memberships would cause serious and permanent danger to the Club's funding or its relationship with its national organization." A judge delivered this opinion: "Perhaps the violation would be clearer if the Boys' Club of Santa Cruz had discriminated on the basis of race, not sex. But that lack of clarity is not the fault of the language of the statute. Instead, the difficulty is the long and well-ingrained tradition of women's dependency which even today causes statutory recognition of the equality of women to have a strange and unreal ring to it."