[33girl]

I'm lazy, so I cut and pasted....

The State Female Normal School, now Longwood College, in Farmville, Va., was the first institution of higher learning in Virginia to admit women for collegiate study. Naturally, it attracted superior students, many of them daughters of college professors already familiar with the fraternity idea.

Among the students in the fall term of 1901 were five women who had become very good friends. Attractive, vivacious, and intelligent, they had been rushed and bid by the existing sororities. However, if they accepted these bids, it would mean that the five would not be sorority sisters. The women thought, if the school could have three sororities, why not four?

On November 15, 1901, a new sorority was organized and named Alpha Sigma Alpha. As stated in the charter, "The purpose of the association shall be to cultivate friendship among its members, and in every way to create pure and elevating sentiments, to perform such deeds and to mould such opinions as will tend to elevate and ennoble womanhood in the world." Signatures to this document include those of Alpha Sigma Alpha's five Founders: Virginia Lee Boyd (Noell), Juliette Jefferson Hundley (Gilliam), Calva Hamlet Watson (Wootton), Louise Burks Cox (Carper), and Mary Williamson Hundley.