After 22-year-old American Margaret Abbott won the women’s golf tournament at the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris, no gold medal was draped around her neck. There was no standing atop a podium as the Stars and Stripes was raised, no homecoming parade, no photo on the front of a Wheaties box.

In fact, Abbott walked off the course unaware that she had just become the first American woman to win an Olympic event, and she remained oblivious to her place in sports history until her death in 1955.

The 1900 Summer Olympics bore little resemblance to today’s global sporting spectacle. Far from consuming Paris, the second staging of the modern Olympic Games was a sideshow to the World’s Fair being held simultaneously in the French capital. The company that organized the 1900 Paris Exposition also managed the schedule of loosely organized sporting events that stretched over six months and included eclectic competitions such as tug-of-war, Basque pelota, kite flying and pigeon racing.

It was far from clear which events were part of the Olympic program and which ones were held in conjunction with the World’s Fair. When Abbott entered a golf tournament staged by the exhibition in October 1900, she thought she was competing merely for the championship of Paris.

Born in India in 1878, Abbott was an infant when her American father died and her novelist mother, Mary Abbott, brought her to the United States. Working as a literary editor for the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Times-Herald, Mary took up a new sport gaining popularity in 1890s high society—golf—and introduced the game to her daughter. Playing at the Chicago Golf Club, Margaret proved a quick learner, winning several local tournaments. The statuesque teenager, nearly six feet tall, was described in newspaper society pages as a “fierce competitor” with a “classy backswing.”

“Margaret Abbott possesses a natural talent for the game,” reported the Inter Ocean in 1898. “Miss Abbott plays golf with exceptional grace and looks exceedingly well on the links. Her drive is of considerable length, and on the green she is entirely at ease.” The newspaper predicted Abbott would become “one of the best women golfers in the United States.”

“When she was playing golf in Chicago, she received a lot of compliments in the society columns regarding her prowess as a golfer,” says Paula Welch, a University of Florida professor emerita and Olympic historian. “I don’t know that she thought about being any kind of a role model and I don’t think she thought of herself as a pioneer, but she really was a pathfinder.”

Mother and daughter moved to the French capital in 1899 where Mary wrote a travel guide to Paris for women and Margaret—as adept at wielding a paintbrush as a putter—studied art under Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. As the century turned, Paris became the center of global attention as visitors and athletes descended upon the city for the World’s Fair and Summer Olympics.

Women Make Their Olympic Debut in Paris

Much like the ancient Olympics after which it was modeled, the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 prohibited women from competing. Four years later, however, 22 women (out of nearly 1,000 athletes) were permitted to participate in the 1900 Summer Olympics in select sports deemed socially acceptable for women such as croquet, equestrianism, tennis and golf.

Dressed in long sleeves and ankle-length skirts, both Mary and Margaret Abbott joined eight other women for a nine-hole tournament staged by the exhibition in Compiègne, 50 miles north of Paris, on October 3, 1900. The golfers who teed off at the Compiègne Golf Club included five French women and five American socialites who were studying or vacationing in Europe.

The largest galleries followed Margaret as she carded a 47, two shots clear of Boston’s Polly Whittier, a descendant of poet John Greenleaf Whittier who spent her summer golfing in St. Moritz, and six better than New York socialite Myra Pratt, who later married a Serbian prince. Mary Abbott shot a 65 in what remains the only time that a mother and daughter competed in the same event in the same Olympics.

After her triumph, Margaret Abbott received an old Saxon porcelain bowl mounted in chiseled gold but no indication she had won an Olympic event. (Gold medals did not become the traditional prize for Olympic champions until the 1904 Summer Games.)

In 1902, Abbott married humorist and political satirist Finley Peter Dunne.  The couple had three sons and one daughter, all of whom were unaware that their mother had been America’s first female Olympic champion until a sleuthing Olympic historian broke the news decades after Abbott’s death in 1955.

Olympic Historian Resurrects Abbott’s Olympic Glory

In 1973, Paula Welch was visiting the U.S. Olympic Committee headquarters in New York City to research her dissertation on America’s female Olympians when she noticed the name of the first woman (misspelled as “Abbot”) on a plaque listing America’s past champions. Welch surmises that Abbott’s name ended up on the plaque because of its inclusion in a government report on the Paris Exhibition that listed her as the champion of the women’s golf event.

Unable to find anyone aware of Abbott’s story, Welch spent a decade tracking down answers herself. After poring through microfilm reels and faded newspapers to learn everything she could about the golfer, Welch published her findings in the October 1982 issue of The Olympian. She subsequently contacted one of Abbott’s sons, Peter Dunne, who learned for the first time that his mother was an Olympic champion.

“There were a lot of women who were advancing sports before Title IX, and they weren’t really given credit,” Welch says. “Margaret Abbott just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and once that door was opened in 1900, women continued to participate in the Olympics.”

Following the 1900 tournament, golf remained off the Olympic program until the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, which meant Abbott remained the reigning women’s Olympic golf champion for more than a century. Thanks to Welch’s resurrection of the golfer’s memory, Abbott was inducted posthumously into the Illinois Golf Hall of Fame in 2023.