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Ms. Shaum walked in that day through those same doors to great fanfare.
“There was a ton of press,” she said. “I got on the news, and people wrote to me from as far away as Canada.”
When she entered on Thursday, the bartender, Pepe Zwaryczuk, 59, paused from pouring ale, and lifted his shirt, to show Ms. Shaum that he was wearing the tan leather belt she made him years back, when her leather goods shop was still two doors down from the saloon.
Ms. Shaum opened the shop in 1960 and lived in the back. She became good neighbors with the McSorley’s staff and made leather belts for employees and wristbands for sore-armed bartenders.
Women never entered during business hours — “Even the owner, Dorothy O’Connell, never came in,” Ms. Shaum recalled of a previous owner — but the staff would invite Ms. Shaum in when the saloon was closed, especially when “Doc,” a staff member who played Gypsy-style fiddle, would perform for his fellow employees.
The issue of Ms. Shaum’s watershed moment at the saloon was revisited this week, with the death last Friday of Faith Seidenberg, the lawyer who helped file a lawsuit that led to a landmark ruling by a federal judge. The ruling, in August 1970, led to the legislation barring discrimination in public places on the basis of sex.
At the time, Daniel O’Connell-Kirwan, the manager of McSorley’s, invited Ms. Shaum to be the first woman through its doors.
“Danny called me and said, ‘Barbara, would you come over and be the first one in?’ ” she recalled.
“I said, ‘Well you got Sara on the other side,’ ” referring to another local shopkeeper, Sara Penn.
And so it was that she, and then Ms. Penn, became the first women let into McSorley’s.
“I put on a big straw hat, and I walked in on Danny’s arm,” she said. “It was a big milestone.”
On Thursday, Ms. Shaum sat at a worn wooden table and corrected a reporter’s offer of a beer.
“It’s ale — they don’t serve beer here,” she said, making the staff smile.
“I’ll wet my whistle a little bit,” she said and hoisted a mug of dark ale.
What Ms. Shaum really wanted was a martini, but McSorley’s drink menu extends only to dark and light ale.
“Martinis are like marriages,” said Ms. Shaum, who was married twice, to men who are now deceased. “Two is enough and three is too many.”
Ms. Shaum said hello to a waiter, Richard Walsh, whose grandfather Martin Buggy, who was known to many as Babs, was working the door when she was admitted. She also greeted the owner, Matthew Maher, who was a bartender when Ms. Shaum made her famous entrance.
Mr. Maher, 75, said the previous owners decided to sell him the saloon because they feared the business would decline after women could enter.
For a time, after Ms. Shaum broke the gender barrier, many male regulars still begrudged the decision, he said.
“It was an awkward time — we had a donnybrook every night,” he said. “It took a long time for the dust to settle, but ultimately it was good for business because of the press attention.”
Ms. Shaum moved her shop off the block in the mid-1980s and now runs it on East Fourth Street. After returning to the shop on Thursday, she poured a shot of Scotch into her coffee and sat at the workbench.
She put that day, back in August 1970, in perspective.
“It was symbolic,” she said. “A woman being able to have an ale somewhere is nice, but equal pay is more important.”
Correction: January 22, 2015
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