Happy Birthday, NPC!
 

Here's a post about the first NPC meeting.

http://wp.me/p20I1i-7N

Thanks for sharing this article...Lillian Thompson was initiated at my chapter (about a zillion years before me).

Thanks
 

Thanks for reading it! Most people's eye glaze over when I start talking about my love of fraternity history, so it's nice to find people who care :-)

I've really enjoyed reading your blog since you started posting here! I read Bound By A Mighty Vow a few years ago and loved it, so your blog is really interesting!

Thanks!
 

I appreciate your kind words. My dissertation looked at the campuses where the seven founding NPC organizations grew. It starts at 1867 and ends when NPC began. I hope to get the dissertation on there soon.

Fran

It does seem very strange to read her repeated usage of the term fraternity instead of sorority; in Gamma Phi the term Sorority (capitalized) is so heavily stressed. I know we used the term at that point, but when did the term sorority become more commonly used to describe women's fraternities?

sorority or women's fraternity?
 

I am in the midst of writing a post about that. The term was coined by a Syracuse professor on the occasion of the founding of Gamma Phi's Beta Chapter at Michigan. Some of the 26 NPC groups are officially a sorority, the others are women's fraternities. It's very confusing.

I'm interested in reading that other post once you write it. I'm curious about when the word sorority became more commonly used across NPC. I am a Beta chapter initiate, so the history of the word is familiar to me. I wear a historic Beta chapter badge from 1919 that was given to me by the original initiate, a close friend of my family who initiated 63 years before me. I also have some very old possessions of her's that were found in her nursing home room when she died at age 98...including her chapter directories from 1924 and 1964, and a 50th anniversary history book from 1932. There was also a receipt for a $10 donation she made to the building fund in 1929! Next month we have our Convention in Denver, and there will be a tour of our IHQ. I really need to take those documents with me for the archives/museum, but it is hard to think about parting with them. I have approval to wear the badge, but she gave that to me when she was only 82. I didn't know she had the other things until she died, and it means so much to me that she brought them with her to the nursing home! She was frail, but very sharp, until her death.

Trivia: Prof. Frank Smalley's sister, Honta Smalley Bredin, was a Gamma Phi Beta at the University of Michigan, but I think he coined the term before she was initiated, because he was at Syracuse and she was not one of the charter members of Beta chapter. I've always been curious about the story behind that, and what impact this had on her joining Gamma Phi Beta herself. I suppose it was a very small world back then what with how few women went to college, and the networking must have been strong.

Michigan Chapter of Gamma Phi
 

I, too, have often wondered about Frank Smalley's sister. Did he influence her? It was a smaller world then and I suspect he did.

How wonderful that you have that special badge and the documents! They are treasures.

One of my favorite stories is about Frances Haven's father. When he was at Michigan, it was said that he was the reason Michigan had not gone co-ed. Then he went to Northwestern where it was promptly touted that he was the reason the school went co-ed. And then he went off to Syracuse where Frances was the one who made history and where Haven is remembered most for the toilet bowl shaped building overlooking Walnut Park.

Forgive me for going off on tangents!

Here's another tangent for you, in the "it's a small world" category. Frances Haven's great-great-great-great granddaughter (I may have an extra great in there) is a Gamma Phi Beta. The Crescent did an article about her last year, after she initiated as a charter member of the chapter I help advise. Many other women in the line have also become Gamma Phi Betas through the years.

There's a Haven Hall at U-M, too, but it's not shaped like a toilet bowl!

Just to pick a nit -- Sir Thomas More used the word "sorority" in his writings in the early 16th Century. But it was never a common word in English prior to the founding of Gamma Phi. Who knows whether the professor at Syracuse was drawing on a knowledge of More's writings or whether he was unaware of the previous use of the word and just did what someone before him had done -- go back to the Latin sororitas and anglicize it in a manner consistent with the anglicization of fraternitas.

That is interesting and I had not heard of a Sir Thomas More connection...in what context did he use the word, since "sororities" as we know them now didn't exist in the early 1500s? A third possibility is that Prof. Smalley wanted to apply a term used in a past context to the Greek women's societies that were forming, or had recently formed.

I have two friends from your chapter! I'm also a graduate of Syracuse University!

Syracuse
 

Well it's terrific meeting another SU grad. How fun that you know two NY Alphas! Wonder if I know them, too.

It would be a religious context, as would the typical context for fraternity prior to the creation of collegiate fraternities. I came across it in the Oxford English Dictionary a few years back. The online version of the OED gives this as the first definition for sorority: "A body or company of women united for some common object, esp. for devotional purposes; †U.S., the female section of a church congregation." I wonder if the "U.S." usage is a historical/archaic thing, since I've never heard it used that way in modern usage. For historical quotations, it gives this:

1532 T. More Confut. Barnes viii, in Wks. 761/1 This would he say for the comfort of ye whole fraternitie and sororiti in general.

1646 E. Pagitt Heresiogr. (ed. 3) 87 The Synod of New-England maketh not onely the fraternity (but, as they speak) the sorority to be the subject of the ‥ . power of the keyes.

1657 J. Watts Scribe, Pharisee 101 [The care] of the fraternity and sorority within their limits.

And it has this for the etymology:

< medieval Latin sororitas, or < Latin soror sister + -ity suffix, after fraternity. Compare obsolete French sororité (Cotgrave 1611).

And yes -- the third possibility you mention is certainly, well, a possibility. :D