What the record shows
Women’s singles at Wimbledon began in 1884, and Maud Watson is the documented first champion. The US national championships added a women’s singles event in 1887. In 1967 Billie Jean King won both Wimbledon and the US title, in what turned out to be the last amateur year: the Open era, in which professionals could enter the major events, began in 1968.
“Major” is a loose word, so this article uses the modern meaning: the four tournaments now grouped as the Grand Slam. They are Wimbledon, the US Open, the French Open and the Australian Open. Each began under a different name and with different rules about who could enter. The phrase “Grand Slam singles” is shorthand for a title at any of them, and winning all four in a single calendar year is the feat the original term was borrowed to describe.
How the four events took shape
Wimbledon came first. The All England Club held a men’s championship in 1877, and a ladies’ event was added in 1884. Maud Watson won it that year and again in 1885. The tournament was played at a ground off Worple Road until the club moved to its present site on Church Road in 1922.
The US championships followed. The men’s event dates from 1881 and the women’s from 1887. The first women’s champion is generally recorded as Ellen Hansell, though early records for the event are thinner than those for Wimbledon, so it is safest to treat details beyond that name with care.
The French and Australian events started later and more modestly. The French national championships were for years restricted to members of French clubs, and they opened to players of all nationalities only in 1925. A women’s singles event existed before then, from the 1890s, but the field was local. The Australasian Championships, as the Australian event was first called, began in 1905, with women’s singles added in the early 1920s.
By the mid-1920s, then, the four events existed in recognisable form. The idea that they formed a set of equals took shape gradually, and it was a men’s idea first: the term “Grand Slam” was applied to the four titles in the 1930s. Maureen Connolly became the first woman to win all four in one calendar year, in 1953.
The early stars
The first generation of champions was largely British and American. Lottie Dod won Wimbledon in 1887 as a teenager of fifteen and went on to win several more. Dorothea Lambert Chambers won the title seven times between 1903 and 1914. In the United States, Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman and later Helen Wills Moody dominated their eras; Wills Moody won Wimbledon eight times.
The most influential figure between the wars was France’s Suzanne Lenglen, who won Wimbledon six times between 1919 and 1925 and brought crowds and newspaper coverage that tennis had not seen before.
The amateur era and its limits
For most of this period the major tournaments were officially amateur. Players were not supposed to earn prize money for winning, though many received expense payments that were quietly generous. Anyone who accepted open payment, as Lenglen did when she turned professional in 1926 and toured, was barred from the major events. Tennis had also left the Olympic movement after the 1924 Games, so the majors were the sport’s highest stage and there was no other.
The result was a sport in which the best women were frequently excluded from competing against the paid game, and in which the champions had few ways to turn success into a living. Althea Gibson, who won her first major in 1956 and the Wimbledon and US titles in 1957 and 1958, turned professional in 1959 largely because there was little money to be made as an amateur champion.
1967: the last amateur year
By 1967 the pressure to open the game was strong. Billie Jean King won the singles at Wimbledon and the US Championships that year, with Britain’s Ann Jones reported as her opponent in both finals. The other two majors went elsewhere: Nancy Richey of the United States won in Australia, and Françoise Durr of France won at the French Championships. Wimbledon that summer was also among the first events shown in colour on British television, as color television began to reach British homes.
The Wimbledon championships and the others were still amateur, but professional tours for both men and women were running alongside them, and the split between the two worlds was becoming harder for the governing bodies to defend. In 1968 the French Championships became the first major open to professionals, and the other three followed within the year.
What came after
Open tennis changed the women’s game quickly. In 1970 a group of nine women signed contracts for a new tour after complaints about the gap between men’s and women’s prize money, a group usually called the Original Nine. The US Open offered equal prize money to men and women from 1973, the year the Women’s Tennis Association was founded. Later the other three majors followed, with Wimbledon the last of the four to do so, in 2007.
In golf, women’s major championships grew along a parallel path, though the details differ. In tennis, the line from Maud Watson in 1884 to the Open era is a record of rules slowly changing, rather than of any single breakthrough.