What is the largest national sorority?

[MysticCat]

Originally posted by rushqueen44
And, let's re-examine this whole largest women's organization in the world. It's not the Girl Scouts. It's the National Panhellenic Conference.

Actually, the NPC has only 26 members -- the 26 inter/national sororities/fraternities that belong to it. They, not the individual members of those sororities/fraternities, are the NPC's members.

Numbers can be so hard to pin down, can't they? Chi O's website says: "Today, Chi Omega is the largest women's fraternal organization in the world with 240,000 initiates." When they say "initiates," I'm not sure if they mean living initiates or total-since-founding initiates. Anyway...

The website of P.E.O. Sisterhood, a fraternal organization for adult women says that P.E.O "has grown from that tiny membership of seven to more than a quarter of a million members in chapters throughout the U.S. and Canada." P.E.O.'s "more than a quarter of a million [i.e., 250,000] members" would seem to be more than Chi O's 240,000.

As for the oft-repeated claim that Chi Omega is the largest women's organization (sometimes the claim is largest "non-profit" women's organization) except for the Girl Scouts, again numbers can be tricky. According to the website of the Woman’s Missionary Union, a women's organization connected to the Southern Baptist Convention, that group has "a membership of approximately 1 million." The website of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs reports that that group "currently has members in 6,500 clubs around the United States, and more than one million members worldwide." Granted, the US membership is not clear, but just an average membership of 40 would take the US membership over 260,000, and I'm guessing (I know I shouldn't do that) that most of the GFWC's members are in the US.

Please don't get me wrong -- I'm not slamming Chi Omega. Chi Omega is an outstanding organization, and its sisters have much to be proud of -- so much, in fact, that it seems to me that they don't need to keep repeating a questionable claim.