My thanks to Charlie Trantanella, Sigma Nu, for this contribution. A graduate of Tufts University and the University of Arizona, he is currently writing a book entitled “Brown and Blue and Greek: A history of fraternities, sororities, and early student organizations at Tufts University”. He plans to publish his work in 2015.
For the students at Tufts College, the start of classes in the fall of 1892 was a radical time indeed. That semester, for the first time in the college’s forty-year history, women were admitted on equal terms with the men. Co-education had finally come to the small school founded by the Universalist church. But while the women were allowed to enroll at Tufts College, they were not exactly welcomed with open arms – most of the faculty and nearly all of the male students and alumni were defiantly opposed to women in the classroom, and they were not shy about making their thoughts known. Despite the cold shoulder, ten women enrolled in the fall of 1892, representing about 5% of the total student body. As pioneers, though, they came to a campus that had absolutely nothing to offer them outside of class: no clubs, no dormitories, no athletic teams, no nothing. Well, not quite. For the two women enrolled in the Tufts Divinity School, there was one organization that welcomed them: the local Hebrew-letter fraternity, Heth Aleph Res.
Heth Aleph Res logo from the 1894 Brown and Blue yearbook of Tufts College
Started by eight men just a year earlier, Heth Aleph Res was a secret fraternity for Tufts divinity school students who longed for a closer association. Most of the divinity students were preparing for careers as ministers in the Universalist faith, a faith known then (as today) for its progressive attitude towards women. So, to the ministers-in-training, inviting women to join their fraternity was a natural practice of what they preached. In the fall of 1892, then, Heth Aleph Res became the first co-ed organization at Tufts College, when Angie M. Brooks and Mrs. Mabel L. MacCoy joined the fraternity. Such a move was soon welcomed by the students, but certainly not replicated – the four national and one local fraternity at Tufts made no effort to admit women themselves.
But Heth Aleph Res wasn’t all that concerned with the other organizations. Rather, the fraternity continued on its trailblazing path. Soon after becoming co-ed, Heth Aleph Res opened up the first ever fraternity chapter house at Tufts College, when the members set up a boarding plan in the house where Miss Brooks and Mrs. MacCoy lived. The other fraternities on campus, recognizing the benefits of such an arrangement, began opening their own chapter houses a semester later. In 1894, Heth Aleph Res convinced the Tufts administration to build them a permanent fraternity house on campus; the structure at 37 Sawyer Avenue in Somerville, MA still stands today. This construction was the first and, to date, only time the college built a house specifically for a fraternity (the rest were built or purchased privately). Unmarried men and women cohabitated in the house, nearly 80 years before dormitories on the campus went co-ed, and for a few months an infant child also lived in the house with his parents. And in 1895, Mrs. MacCoy became the first female minister called to a Universalist church in Massachusetts, when she took over as pastor of First Universalist Parish in Mansfield. Finally, Heth Aleph Res became the first national fraternity founded at Tufts College, as by 1900 it had expanded to at least one other theological school.
Sadly, the tide turned against Heth Aleph Res near the turn of the century, when enrollment at the Tufts Divinity School plummeted. The fraternity gave up its chapter house in 1899, and by 1903 it appears to have dissolved, never to return. The divinity school itself would last until 1968, just one year shy of its 100th anniversary. As for co-ed fraternities, the idea did not catch on again at Tufts until 1974, when the last remaining members of the Gamma Beta chapter of Alpha Tau Omega decided to admit women as equals, thereby becoming the co-ed fraternity ATO of Massachusetts, an organization which is still active on campus today.
This photo of the Heth Aleph Re was taken between 1896 and 1897. The young child and mother shown in the photo lived in the fraternity house for about a year. The two women on the far left, it appears, were the cook and housekeeper. There were at least three women living in the house at the time, but unfortunately they do not appear in the photo. The address of this house is 37 Sawyer Avenue, Somerville MA, and is currently used as special interest student housing for aspiring artists – hence its name, the Arts Haus. (Photo from Crane Theological School Photos 1887-1965, UA008/003 Box 10. Tufts University. Digital Collections and Archives. Medford, MA)
