Quote:
Originally Posted by blueangel
"Zeta Tau Alpha is known as a fraternity, not as a sorority. The Founders intended Zeta Tau Alpha be designated a 'fraternity' to distinguish the organization from the sisterhoods organized in connection with men's fraternities, called 'sororities.'"
http://web.archive.org/web/200304210...a.org/trad.htm |
Quote:
Originally Posted by 33girl
And again, WHAT SORORITIES DOES IT REFER TO??? Do they still exist? Were they little sister groups? Are they sororities that died out? What?
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Yes, the reference would appear to be to what would later be called little sister groups, not to what we would call sororities today, and certainly not to any current or former NPC members orgs.
I believe that I have seen references to little sister orgs being called "sororities" in the days before that term came to refer exclusively to women's "fraternities." While we all know that Gamma Phi Beta was the first org to use the term "sorority" rather than "fraternity" or "fraternity for women," it must be remembered that
sororitas (sisterhood) is pure Latin that would have been known to almost any fraternity man in the mid-1880s, Latin and Greek being core elements of a classical education. (Some etymologies I have looked at show the earliest use in English of the word "sorority" to have been circa 1530. Wish I had an OED handy.)
In the mid- to late-1800s, some fraternities had fairly organized "sororities," if you will, "of little sisters." I know that fraternities at Hampden-Sydney, located in the same Virginia county as Farmville, did. (My great-grandmother and her sisters were part of that group -- she wore my great-grandfather's Pike badge, which I now have. I also have an old Pike history with pictures of that chapter from the 1880s -- those pictures show the "little sisters" together with the brothers, my great-grands included.)
I would not be surprised that the founders of ZTA were familiar with the practice and terminology at Hampden-Sydney and chose to distinguish themselves from it. At the same time, the founders of KD, Tri-Sigma and ASA may not have felt the same need.
Perhaps ZTA removed the quote above from its national website to avoid risk of the very confusion seen in this thread.
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