Question About Old NPC Rules

[33girl]

Originally Posted by naraht

Theta Phi Alpha was the *last* of the NPC members to officially discriminate. (On non-Catholic campuses they only took Catholic Women). This was removed in 1968.

I'm not familiar with any NPC sororities that discriminated by Major.

FYP.

Also, does that mean if a non-Catholic was attending a Catholic college, they could join?

[Munchkin03]

Originally Posted by 33girl

FYP.

Also, does that mean if a non-Catholic was attending a Catholic college, they could join?

How many officially discriminated? I know it wasn't uncommon among the fraternities, and many of them only removed discriminatory clauses within the last 50-75 years.

[glittergal1985]

Originally Posted by 33girl

FYP.

Also, does that mean if a non-Catholic was attending a Catholic college, they could join?

Only Catholic women were considered for membership, regardless of the college's religious affiliation.

[naraht]

Originally Posted by glittergal1985

Only Catholic women were considered for membership, regardless of the college's religious affiliation.

Theta Phi Alpha had a time where due to the President of Creighton University's insistence they allowed non-Catholic women at Catholic Universities and only Catholic women at non-Catholic Universities. So all women at Creighton and only Catholics at U of Michigan. This ended in 1968. I'm working from the Theta Phi Alpha history book here.

[naraht]

Originally Posted by 33girl

FYP.

Also, does that mean if a non-Catholic was attending a Catholic college, they could join?

Not sure in which way you fixed my post. Please explain further.

[33girl]

Originally Posted by naraht

Not sure in which way you fixed my post. Please explain further.

TPA may have been the last to have something in their policies but I'm sure there were chapters out there where it was an unwritten rule that this or that religion was not welcome long after that.

[sugar and spice]

Originally Posted by naraht

Not sure in which way you fixed my post. Please explain further.

She added the word "officially," meaning that discrimination in many organizations went on past the point where official clauses were removed. (I know that a former poster here talked about a family friend who was African-American and pledged an organization in the early '70s where there was pressure from nationals to depledge her, for example.) For some organizations, there's a difference between the years when organizations removed their discriminatory clauses and the years where the national board actually stopped trying to enforce it.

Originally Posted by Munchkin03

How many officially discriminated? I know it wasn't uncommon among the fraternities, and many of them only removed discriminatory clauses within the last 50-75 years.

I've been trying to find this information for years, and it's surprisingly hard to dig up unless you've got access to all the official documents at headquarters. I know that in the book Bound by a Mighty Vow, the author said that Theta didn't have any written policies (but of course they had unwritten ones). She also cited a 1926 survey of the 17 NPC members stated that 5 of them had official Protestants-only policies. She even mentions that a few chapters kept non-Christians to a percentage of the chapter or even an actual number limit! And information on which organizations had official race-related discrimination policies is even harder to find.

I think a lot of the sororities have refused to confess their previous whites-only/Protestants-only policies out of embarrassment. And they should be embarrassed about it--but I don't think there's any reason why they should be more embarrassed than the organizations who didn't have written policies but did have unwritten ones. (Which, uh, is basically all of them.) Nobody's hands are clean in this--even the historically Jewish groups tended to discriminate against less assimilated, more "foreign" Jewish girls. I don't think that the existence of official policies signifies much--I'm just interested in it from the standpoint of historical curiosity. I wish the groups would put it out there.

[tcsparky]

I would guess that many organizations don't reveal past membership criteria because, even if it is in the past, it is still membership selection information. This would have been shared only with initiated sisters then, and would most likely only be shared with initiates now.

[sugar and spice]

Originally Posted by tcsparky

I would guess that many organizations don't reveal past membership criteria because, even if it is in the past, it is still membership selection information. This would have been shared only with initiated sisters then, and would most likely only be shared with initiates now.

Another poster here once said that sororities' racial/religious restrictions were printed in some copies of Baird's Manual, which, if true, makes this theory unlikely. But I admit I've never seen a Baird's in which this was the case, at least for the Protestant-only groups. (A number of Bairds list membership restrictions for Jewish-only or Catholic-only groups.) Granted, I've never seen a Baird's from the '30s or '40s, which is when I'm guessing this stuff would have been most explicitly spelled out.

[naraht]

Originally Posted by sugar and spice

Another poster here once said that sororities' racial/religious restrictions were printed in some copies of Baird's Manual, which, if true, makes this theory unlikely. But I admit I've never seen a Baird's in which this was the case, at least for the Protestant-only groups. (A number of Bairds list membership restrictions for Jewish-only or Catholic-only groups.) Granted, I've never seen a Baird's from the '30s or '40s, which is when I'm guessing this stuff would have been most explicitly spelled out.

Unlikely, remember Baird's was written from the inside of the fraternal movement.

[DeltaBetaBaby]

Originally Posted by sugar and spice

Nobody's hands are clean in this--even the historically Jewish groups tended to discriminate against less assimilated, more "foreign" Jewish girls.

Typically, the German Jews thought they were better than the Eastern European Jews. On some campuses, there were two historically Jewish groups, and there was a stark divide in their memberships.

[honeychile]

Originally Posted by DeltaBetaBaby

Typically, the German Jews thought they were better than the Eastern European Jews. On some campuses, there were two historically Jewish groups, and there was a stark divide in their memberships.

Wow, this blows my mind!


I went to Pitt in the 1970s, when the student population was roughly one-third Catholic, one-third Jewish, and one-third "other" (I was an "other"). I mentioned in my recruitment thread how sororities managed to discriminate by asking, "my fiance gave me a Sedar Plate, would you like to see it?"; "Which mass do you prefer?"; or "do you need tickets for the High Holy Days?" This happened during the Open Houses/chat-dating part of rush. Depending on your response, you were either cut or given a pass to the next round.

While I was an active, I don't think I ever saw a non-Jewish woman pledge a Jewish sorority, nor a non-Catholic pledge TPA. That said, they had a very large pool of interested parties who met their standards available to them.