The May 1920 issue of The American Golfer included an article with the title “Yes, I’m a Golf Widow.” It was written “By One of Them.” It begins,

It’s my lot to be the wife of a week-end golfer who from early April till late in November permits nothing to interfere with his weekly pleasure. …  I know he works hard during the week and deserves some pleasant recreation on Saturday and Sunday. He can’t get this by sticking around the house. I was first to discover that he needed something in the athletic line in the open air. I suggested golf to him and he finally got interested, but I am sorry now that I every heard the word.

In the April 1917 issue of The American Golfer, The Rev. John B. Kelly wrote an article with the title “The Moral Value of Golf” in which he counseled,

Let the golf widow not bemoan her lonesome fate, but be glad in her solitude. Her husband may be dead to her when he is embalmed in the allurements of golf, but he will be alive and strong to protect her many years after her neighbor is keeping her stay-at-home husband’s memory fresh in the immortelles she places on his grave.

Those are pretty strong words! James J. Montague, an American poet and writer, and  penned an equally strong message in his poem “Lines to a Golf Widow” which appeared in the November 1921 issue of the same magazine.

Lines to a Golf Widow

If you had said eight months ago
When January blizzards blew,
And all the greens were deep with snow,
That I must give up golf or you,
I might have stayed the fatal step,
I might before it was too late,
Have vowed that we should never sep-
Arate.

If, even in the early Spring,
When we were playing winter rules,
When mud flew thick on every swing,
And balls fell “chug!” in casual pools,
You’d been disposed to raise a row
And talked of leaving me again,
I might have listen to you now
And then.

Indeed along in mid July
When sultry blew the listless breeze,
And temperatures ran rather high—
Say ninety-two or -three degrees,
Had you the riot statute read
Till I agreed to quit, I might—
I can’t be sure—I might have said:
“All right!”

But now, when greens are hard and fast,
And fairways like an emerald floor,
When I have got the swing at last
And confidently bawl out “Fore!”
Your threat to part may be a bluff’
Or you may really pack and go,
But I shall not be home enough
To know !