Why no single first can be named
The question sounds simple, but it has no clean answer. Women’s golf did not begin with a fixed list of major championships. Different events were treated as the most important at different times, and the list that is used today was assembled gradually. Which tournament counts as a “major” depends on the era you pick, so any claim to name one first woman to win one would be shaky.
What can be said with confidence is the general shape of the history. Organised women’s amateur golf began in the 1890s. A professional circuit took shape in the 1940s and 1950s. The US Women’s Open dates from 1946, and the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) was formed in 1950. In 1967, the year this site looks at, Kathy Whitworth was one of the leading players on the LPGA tour, and the French amateur Catherine Lacoste won the US Women’s Open.
The amateur beginnings
Women played golf in Britain and the United States well before there was any prize money to speak of. The British Ladies Amateur Championship dates from 1893, and a national women’s amateur championship in the United States followed in 1895. These were the prestigious events of their day, and for several decades the leading women golfers were amateurs. Women’s golf was also included in the 1900 Olympic Games in Paris, one of the earliest occasions on which women competed in the modern Olympic movement, although the event was small and the circumstances of the Games were chaotic.
In that period “major” was an informal idea. The amateur championships carried the status, and strong players built their reputations there.
The professional era begins
The move toward a professional game was slow. A handful of events with prize money emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. Among those later remembered as important were the Western Open, first held around 1930, and the Titleholders Championship, which began in the late 1930s. Both were widely regarded as top events in their time, and both later disappeared from the schedule, which is one reason historians disagree about a tidy list.
The US Women’s Open began in 1946, with Patty Berg the first champion at a match-play event in Spokane, Washington. It soon changed to stroke play. It was initially run by a women’s professional organisation and later came under the control of the United States Golf Association, which still runs it. Because the Open has been played every year since and has always been open to the best players, it is the one event in the women’s game with a strong claim to the oldest major status.
The LPGA and its championships
In 1950 a group of players, including Babe Zaharias, Patty Berg and Louise Suggs, formed the LPGA. Zaharias, a former Olympic track and field athlete, did much to bring the women’s game to a wider public, and she won the US Women’s Open in 1948, 1950 and 1954. The tour’s own championship was first staged in the mid-1950s. Over the following decades the tour’s sponsors, names and venues changed repeatedly, and so did the events described as majors.
This is why comparisons with other sports can mislead. Tennis settled on its four Grand Slam singles titles long ago, and the idea of a single “first” winner is easier to discuss there. Golf’s women’s majors never had that stability. For many years the tour recognised four majors, and later a fifth was added when the Women’s British Open was given major status in the early 2000s, followed by the Evian Championship in France in the 2010s. Treat any list of “the majors” as belonging to a particular year.
Women’s golf in 1967
By the 1960s the LPGA tour was established but small, with modest prize funds compared with the men’s game. Kathy Whitworth was among its most successful players during the decade, and she went on to win more LPGA titles than any other golfer, a record total of 88, according to the tour’s own records. Her 1967 season was one of strong results in a long career, and she is a good example of how dominant a single player could be on a circuit of that size.
The US Women’s Open that year was played on the Cascades course at The Homestead in Virginia, and it was won by Catherine Lacoste of France. She was an amateur, aged 22, and remains the only amateur to have won the event, which makes the result a rarity rather than a sign of how the game was run. Her father, René Lacoste, was a famous French tennis champion, so sport ran in the family.
For a sense of how golf sat in the wider sporting year, it helps to remember that the men’s story that summer was dominated by Jack Nicklaus, and that 1967 produced many other sporting moments that fans still remember. Women’s golf drew far smaller crowds and television audiences, but its structure was in place.
After 1967
The decades since have brought a far more international women’s game, with players from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas winning the sport’s biggest titles. Prize money rose and new tours appeared in Europe and elsewhere. Details of that growth differ by region, and the other articles in this cluster take the continents one at a time.
The short answer to the title is that there was no single founding moment. Women’s golf accumulated its major championships over about a century, and the early champions of the amateur events, the US Women’s Open and the pre-LPGA professional tournaments each have a reasonable claim to being among the first.