A hedged answer to “first”
The United States is where most of the women’s major championships have been played, but even here the title’s “first” needs care. Women were winning national amateur titles in the 1890s, long before any event was called a major, and the professional game developed through several tournaments at once. This article therefore describes the early titles and does not claim a single first winner of a “major” without qualification.
What can be said with confidence: the US Women’s Open was first played in 1946, the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) was founded in 1950, and the 1967 US Women’s Open was held at the Cascades course at The Homestead resort in Hot Springs, Virginia.
The early amateur championships
An American national championship for women amateurs was established in the 1890s, shortly after the British event, and it was for several decades the leading women’s tournament in the country. It drew the elite of a game that was still played mainly at private clubs. Prize money was small or nonexistent, and the best players were amateurs by choice or necessity. In that period the amateur championship carried the prestige later attached to the majors.
The US Women’s Open begins
The first US Women’s Open was held in 1946 at the Spokane Country Club in Washington State, and it was won by Patty Berg. The first edition was played as a match-play event, but it changed to stroke play after that. In the early years it was organised by a women’s professional organisation. Control passed to the United States Golf Association, the same body that runs the men’s US Open, in the early 1950s.
Berg is a good example of the era’s leading figures. She was a champion as an amateur and then as a professional, and she was also a teacher of the game who travelled widely to promote it. Betty Jameson, who won the following year, was another of the early stars.
Babe Zaharias and the LPGA
Mildred “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias had been an Olympic medallist in track and field in 1932 before taking up golf seriously. Her fame brought crowds and press attention to women’s golf. She won the US Women’s Open in 1948, 1950 and 1954, the last of those a few months after cancer surgery, and she died in 1956.
The LPGA was formed in 1950 by a small group of professionals, including Zaharias, Berg and Louise Suggs, so that women would have an organised tour with a regular schedule. The early years were financially difficult, and the players sometimes helped run tournaments themselves. The tour grew slowly through the 1950s and 1960s. Other early events regarded as important, such as the Western Open and the Titleholders Championship, eventually disappeared from the calendar, while the Open and the tour’s own championship endured.
The 1967 US Women’s Open
The 1967 championship was played at the Cascades course at The Homestead in Virginia. The winner was Catherine Lacoste of France, who was an amateur and aged 22. She remains the only amateur to have won the US Women’s Open. Her victory made headlines partly because the contest was seen as a clash between the professionals who dominated the tour and an outsider without a playing card.
Kathy Whitworth was among the leading professionals of the time, and she would go on to a record total of 88 LPGA titles. Lacoste’s win did not signal a change in the balance of the game, since she did not turn professional and stepped back from top competition soon afterward. It was one of the more unusual results in the Open’s history.
The wider American scene
Women’s golf in 1967 was a modest part of the sporting landscape. Men’s golf had its stars, with Jack Nicklaus the leading name, and across the sporting year there were plenty of larger stories. Carl Yastrzemski’s Triple Crown season in baseball gripped the Boston area, and Super Bowl I marked the start of a new era in American football. Television contracts and sponsorship were growing fast for those sports, while the LPGA tour relied on smaller purses and a loyal base of fans.
There was also a wider story of Black athletes breaking barriers in tennis and golf in the same period. Althea Gibson had won tennis titles in the 1950s and then played professional golf, which gives some sense of how slowly the doors of the sporting establishment opened. The history of race and golf in America is a subject of its own, and this article does not try to cover it.
Later development
In the decades after 1967 the tour grew, prize money rose and the list of majors was revised several times. The Open itself kept its place at the centre of the women’s calendar, with the winners increasingly coming from every part of the world. Today it remains one of the five majors recognised by the LPGA.
The honest answer to the title is a series of qualified “firsts”: the first US Women’s Open in 1946, won by Patty Berg; the founding of the LPGA in 1950; and, within the story of 1967, the unusual win of an amateur from France. The American record offers many early champions, and what counts as the first “major” depends on whether you begin with the amateur championships, the early professional events or the Open.