This book begins from a simple observation.
Organised women’s golf exists as a well-structured system of play and competition, yet it has not been formally recorded as such.
This book seeks to illuminate the participation system built by women, and to show how it was created, developed, and adapted in response to external conditions and constraints.
Women’s golf did not develop through inclusion into existing structures. It was sustained, from the outset, as a parallel system built by women themselves.
Golfers, both women and men, had been playing on courses across the country for many years, developing their skill and enjoying competitive and social golf across men’s, women’s, and mixed formats. When women began to organise themselves around competition, they did so from an already established base of play.
In 1867, a group of women formed a club, creating rules and regular competition. This was the pivotal moment in the emergence of a women’s system that would develop in parallel to the men’s game.
Across regions and localities, women were already playing regularly and visibly before formal structures emerged to coordinate that activity. What followed was not imposed from above, but built from within.
This system was not abstract. It was visible in fixtures, competitions, club organisation, and the steady rhythm of play. It enabled continuity over time and across generations.
Yet it was rarely recorded as a system. As a result, it has remained largely unrecognised in the histories that followed.
What goes unrecorded can remain invisible. When it is illuminated, it becomes possible to see, and to understand, what was there all along.
The creation of women’s clubs or sections demonstrates that, from its inception, golf supported equitable experiences for both men and women, shaped to their own needs. Evidence from the pre-war years shows women playing openly, regularly, and often with the support of existing clubs and communities.
The purpose of this book is to recover that system.
Not to revise the past, but to see it more clearly.
Not to challenge what is known, but to recognise what has been present, though often overlooked.
As the author, my role is to curate and steward the history of women’s golf, not as an owner, but as a custodian of a shared inheritance built by women golfers across generations.
In doing so, this book offers a different way of understanding how women’s golf developed, one grounded in continuity, organisation, and the structures that sustained both
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