Margaret Abbott

Margaret Abbott
Portrait by Charles Dana Gibson,[1] c. 1903
Personal information
Full name	Margaret Ives Abbott
Born	(1878-06-15)June 15, 1878 Calcutta, British India
Died	June 10, 1955(1955-06-10) (aged 76) Greenwich, Connecticut, U.S.
Height	5 ft 11 in (180 cm)[2]
Sporting nationality	United States
Spouse	Finley Peter Dunne ​ ​ (m. 1902; died 1936)​
Children	4, including Philip
Career
Status	Amateur
Medal record Women's golf Representing  United States Olympic Games 1900 Paris Individual

Margaret Ives Abbott (June 15, 1878 – June 10, 1955) was an American amateur golfer. She was the first American woman to win an Olympic event: the women's golf tournament at the 1900 Summer Olympics. (Although, the first woman ever to win an Olympic event, Hélène de Pourtalès, was American-born, but married into Swiss nobility.)

Born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), British Raj, in 1878, Abbott moved with her family to Chicago in 1884. She joined the Chicago Golf Club in Wheaton, Illinois, where she received coaching from Charles B. Macdonald and H. J. Whigham. In 1899, she traveled with her mother to Paris to study art. The following year, along with her mother, she signed up for a women's golf tournament without realizing that it was the second modern Olympics. Abbott won the tournament with a score of 47 strokes; her mother tied for seventh place. Abbott received a porcelain bowl as a prize.

In December 1902, she married the writer Finley Peter Dunne. They later moved to New York and had four children. Abbott died at the age of 76 in 1955, never realizing that she won an Olympic event. She was not well known until Paula Welch, a professor at the University of Florida, researched her life. In 2018, The New York Times published her belated obituary.