Welcome to the Women’s Golf History Project

For more than a century, women have shaped golf in ways that are profound, strategic and deeply influential — yet so much of their work has been overlooked, undocumented, or simply absorbed into a history that rarely centred on them.

The Womens Golf History Project (WGH) exists to change that.

The Womens Golf History Project sits at the intersection of history, governance, culture, community, and lived experience — and aims to rebuild the archive of women’s golf in a way that honours the past while helping us understand the present and informing the future.

This Substack is the home for that work.

Click HERE or the image below to watch the Architecture of Womens Golf Video to start learning about womens golf from its early days:

⭐ Why This Project Matters

When I first began exploring the history of women’s golf, I discovered something striking:

the women who built the game created the systems we still use today — yet their stories are scarcely remembered.

When I first began exploring the history of women’s golf, something became immediately clear:

the story of women’s golf is really the story of women’s lives — and those lives changed dramatically over the last 135 years, while men’s did not.

Women moved:

from home to education
from domestic roles to professional lives
from restricted mobility to autonomy
from limited opportunity to expanded horizons

Every shift in society reshaped women’s ability to play, compete, travel, join clubs, or remain in the game. Golf reflects this evolution with extraordinary clarity.

Meanwhile, men’s patterns of work, leisure and access remained broadly stable — until very recently.

This divergence is written into the structures of the game:

the days competitions are held
who gets access to time
who the system was designed for
where support exists — and where it doesn’t

Understanding this social context is key to understanding today’s participation patterns and the gaps in women’s pathways, and creating a future for golf that supports the modern lives of both women and men.

⭐ What You’ll Find Here

Insights drawn from 135 years of women’s golf, including:

• Pioneer Profiles

Stories of women like Issette Pearson, Mabel Stringer and Molly Gourlay — organisers, community builders, architects, referees, champions — whose impact shaped the game even when their names did not survive in common memory.

• The Invisible Architecture of Women’s Golf

How early governance decisions, handicapping systems, and competition structures still influence the modern game — and how they explain today’s gaps for women and girls.

• Senior Women — Custodians of Continuity

A look at the women who preserved the heart of the amateur game through stability, leadership, and community.

• Research, Archives & Discoveries

Timelines, documents, letters, championship histories, newspaper accounts and insights from my ongoing archival work.

• Essays on the Modern Game

Why women aged 25–49 leave golf, the missing mid-amateur pathway, and what modernisation looks like when women’s lives sit at the centre of the design.

This publication is not just about the past — it is also about understanding the present and shaping the future.

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