Women in Golf
Women have been playing golf since the fifteenth century. Mary Queen of Scots — whose name is attached to more golfing firsts than the historical evidence strictly supports — is one of the earliest documented women players, but the clubs and courses of late Victorian Scotland and England had women members well before formal women's organisations existed. The Ladies Golf Union, founded in Britain in 1893, was among the first national golf governing bodies of any kind, predating several of its male counterparts. The history of women in golf is not a story of arrival from the outside; it is a story of parallel development that for too long received inadequate recognition and resources.
The Founding of the LPGA
The LPGA Tour was established in 1950 by thirteen founding players who, frustrated by the absence of a professional structure comparable to the nascent PGA Tour, created their own. Among those founders were Babe Didrikson Zaharias — the Texas-born Olympic athlete who had turned to golf with explosive results in the 1940s — Patty Berg, Louise Suggs, and Betty Jameson. The early years were characterised by financial precarity: purses were small, sponsorship limited, and logistics for a travelling professional women's tour were genuinely challenging in mid-century America.
What the founding group had in abundance was playing ability and the willingness to promote their own tour. Babe Zaharias, who won 41 LPGA events and ten major championships before her death from cancer in 1956 at the age of 45, was the game's dominant figure in its first decade. Patty Berg won 60 LPGA events over a career spanning four decades. Louise Suggs won 61 events including 11 majors. Their playing records established the LPGA as a genuine professional tour rather than a promotional venture.
The Women's Majors
The women's game has five major championships, more than the men's four. The AIG Women's Open (formerly the Women's British Open) achieved major status in 2001, joining the Chevron Championship (formerly the Dinah Shore, then the Kraft Nabisco Championship), the KPMG Women's PGA Championship, the US Women's Open, and The Chevron Championship at Mission Hills. The US Women's Open is the oldest and most prestigious; Babe Zaharias won three of them.
The structure of the women's majors has evolved significantly. Purses have increased substantially over the past decade — the US Women's Open now carries a total purse approaching ten million dollars — and television coverage has expanded. The decision to stage the 2024 US Open at Pinehurst No. 2 concurrently with the men's event was a landmark moment in the championship's visibility.
Kathy Whitworth and the Records
Kathy Whitworth won 88 LPGA Tour events between 1962 and 1985 — more victories than any professional golfer of any gender in the history of any major tour. Sam Snead's 82 PGA Tour victories are the men's equivalent benchmark; Whitworth exceeded it by six. She won seven major championships and was LPGA Tour Player of the Year seven times. Despite this record, Whitworth never won the US Women's Open — the one significant gap in her otherwise comprehensive resume. Her career demonstrates both the extraordinary depth of talent in the women's game and the obscurity into which even its greatest practitioners can fall outside the sport's core audience.
Mickey Wright and Nancy Lopez
Mickey Wright is the player that serious students of golf regard as the greatest woman golfer of the twentieth century. She won 82 LPGA events and thirteen major championships between 1955 and 1969, including four US Women's Opens, and her ball-striking was described by Ben Hogan — no easy judge — as technically the finest swing he had seen. Wright retired from full-time competition at 34, almost certainly prematurely, due to health issues and fatigue with the travel demands of professional golf.
Nancy Lopez arrived in 1977 and transformed the tour's profile almost overnight. In her first full season in 1978, she won nine events — including five consecutive victories — was named both Rookie of the Year and Player of the Year, and generated a level of media interest that the LPGA had never previously experienced. Lopez won 48 events and three major championships over her career, but her importance to women's golf transcended statistics. She made the tour compelling to a mainstream sports audience that had largely ignored it.
Annika Sorenstam
Annika Sorenstam is the player that the modern era of women's professional golf is measured against. The Swedish player dominated the LPGA Tour from the mid-1990s through her retirement in 2008 in a manner that had no parallel since Wright's prime. She won 72 LPGA events and ten major championships, was the first woman since Babe Zaharias to play a PGA Tour co-sanctioned event (the 2003 Bank of America Colonial), and shot a 59 in the 2001 Standard Register Ping — the first time a woman had broken 60 in an official LPGA Tour event. Sorenstam's approach to the game — systematic, physically disciplined, and analytically rigorous — helped professionalise the preparation standards of the women's game.
Her rivalry with Karrie Webb, the Australian player who won seven majors and 41 LPGA events, defined the late 1990s and early 2000s. Webb won the Grand Slam of the four major championships and the five women's majors that existed at different points in her career. The Sorenstam-Webb era produced some of the best-sustained women's professional golf ever played.
The Korean Influence
No development in women's golf over the past twenty-five years has been more significant than the emergence of South Korean players as the tour's dominant demographic. Beginning with Se Ri Pak's twin major wins in 1998 — the US Women's Open and the LPGA Championship — Korean women have won more than half of all major championships in the 21st century. Park In-Bee completed the career Grand Slam in 2008, at 19 the youngest player ever to do so; Inbee Park dominated the late 2010s with seven major victories; Ko Jin-young held the world number one ranking for a record 116 consecutive weeks. The Korean success story is attributed to a combination of systematic player development infrastructure, a culture that treats golf achievement with the seriousness typically reserved for academic success, and an intense domestic competitive circuit that prepares players rigorously before they arrive on tour.
Equal Access and Augusta National
The question of women's access to private golf clubs — membership, tee time availability, and competitive participation — has been a defining issue in the sport's modern history. Augusta National, the most famous club in the world, did not admit women members until 2012, when Condoleezza Rice and Darla Moore became the first. Muirfield, the Scottish links that hosts The Open Championship, voted against admitting women in 2016 and was removed from the Open rota as a result; it reversed its position in 2017. Royal Troon and St Andrews admitted women members in 2016 and 2015 respectively.
These changes came slowly and required external pressure, including the threat of losing major championship hosting rights. The conversation about equal access to golf facilities — from private club membership to tee-time equality at public courses — has advanced substantially but is not uniformly resolved.
The Global Women's Game
The LET (Ladies European Tour) operates alongside the LPGA as the second major women's professional circuit, with co-sanctioned events bringing the tours together several times per year. The DP World Tour's growing investment in women's golf — including the increased prize funds of the LET Access Series, which serves as the developmental tour — reflects a broader commercial recognition that women's golf has an underserved audience.
The Women's Amateur Championship, the Curtis Cup, and the Solheim Cup — the biennial match between the United States and Europe that has provided some of the most compelling team golf of any gender — represent the highest level of women's competition outside the major championships. The Solheim Cup in particular has generated moments of genuine sporting drama: Europe's comeback win at Gleneagles in 2019, and the extraordinary tension of Finca Cortesin in 2023, demonstrate that the women's game at its best delivers as compelling a contest as anything in professional golf.
Open the map to find courses near you — wherever you play golf, you are part of a history that women have shaped since the game's earliest centuries.