Was this exclusive women's influence in early golf because women didn't really care to play golf with men and vice versa and so they tended to do things completely on their own more than today?
You're right, women did have a lot of influence on The Game. I remember reading somewhere that Mary (cousin to Elizabeth) was the first recorded woman golfer in 1567. Supposedly her attendants were called 'cadets,' from which our term 'caddies' is derived. Pretty basic, eh?
Also, women were the instigators behind the ball drop, and are also credited with coming up with the idea of the unplayable lie (and that penalty stroke).
You pose an interesting question. Why didn't women play with men? Why is Shinnecock a notable exception, rather than the rule? Even St. Andrew's was restricted to men only until 1855, when Mrs. Wolfe-Murray broke through the ranks to become the first woman member.
It is possible that from the mid-1800s to the end of the Edwardian era women didn't play with men because they preferred not to. There is at least one supposition that can be made. The costume prescribed by fashions of the time made merely walking up stairs a difficult proposition (thus the 'fainting couch' which could be found on staircase landings).
Having gone thus attired to various performing gigs, it is hard to imagine swinging a golf club while properly corseted. In 1850, women were still wearing hoops. They were replaced around 1889 by the bustle of the Gay 90s. Perhaps women did not like to be so out of fashion and propriety as to go without their stays while in the company of men.
Women who opted out of the fashion of the day were scandalous, and, while a good number of upper and middle class women did become suffragettes, fighting for women's rights (particularly the vote) with vehemence, and even violence, many more chose to live within their traditional roles.
It was not until the 1920s and the evolution of the flapper that corseting fell out of favor. Try to picture a Gibson girl, with wasp-waist corset and fetching bustle, swinging an iron (much less walking a course). It's absurd.
Slacks (where do you think THAT name originated?
) did not become truly acceptable attire for women until Audrey Hepburn wore them so stunningly in the 1950's. So, I suppose the dictates of fashion might have been in some ways responsible for keeping respectable women from golfing with their male counterparts. If so, that attitude certainly has undergone a turnaround, and starting pretty early on.
It seems rather more likely (if one can assume that some attitudes and habits pass through generations unchanged) that men preferred to play sans women. This attitude has certainly prevailed to a certain extent, surviving even the extremes of modern feminism.
Certainly English suffragettes in the early 1900s must have felt golf was predominantly a man's game, as golf courses became a target for vandalism during the violent demonstrations preceding WWI.
It seems that at times of extreme rebellion against what some women view as unfair discrimination, golf courses become a negative symbol of the male bastion to be attacked . . . whether it was courses being burnt with acid at the turn of the 20th century, or diatribes against male-only courses at the turn of the 21rst.
I don't know where the separatist attitudes which still prevail, to a certain extent, came from . . . but you've whetted my curiosity, and I'm going to think about it.
