October 15 is Founders’ Day for both Alpha Chi Omega and Zeta Tau Alpha. In 1885, Alpha Chi Omega was founded at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Thirteen years later, in 1898, Zeta Tau Alpha was founded at the State Female Normal School (now Longwood University) in Farmville, Virginia.
Alpha Chi Omega’s seven founders, Anna Allen, Olive Burnett, Bertha Deniston, Amy DuBois, Nellie Gamble, Bessie Grooms and Estelle Leonard, were students in the DePauw School of Music. With the guidance and support of James Hamilton Howe, Dean of the School of Music, they created an organization that at its beginning insisted its members possess some musical culture. The first appearance of Alpha Chi Omega was in Meharry Hall of East College. The seven women wore scarlet and olive ribbon streamers attached to their dresses to display the organization’s colors.
Zeta Tau Alpha‘s founders are Alice Maud Jones Horner, Frances Yancey Smith, Alice Bland Coleman, Ethel Coleman Van Name, Ruby Bland Leigh Orgain, Mary Campbell Jones Batte, Helen May Crafford, Della Lewis Hundley, and Alice Grey Welsh.
One hundred years ago, October 15, 1918, the country was at war in Europe. Founders’ Day celebrations must have been subdued out of respect for the men who were fighting across the ocean. Women’s roles in the war effort were ancillary. The following entry about the Iota Chapter of Alpha Chi Omega at the University of Illinois appeared in the November 1918 Lyre.
According to an account in the University of Illinois Alumni News (Vol. 4):
Last March Ola Wyeth ’06 made up her mind that the War had been dominated long enough by men and that the time was at hand for her to get a little nearer the smoke of battle than her old job as seminar librarian at the University permitted. To be sure, she found and did much of the conventional sort of feminine war work on the campus, but all this seemed to her over the hills and far away. So she gave her book shelves a last going over packed her baggage, entrained for Camp Wadsworth, SC, and began operations as the first woman camp hospital librarian. She started without a book or a place to put a book and even had the pleasure of making her own rules. When she left five months later, she could point to a library of 3,500 volumes. The books were housed in the chapel which she had fitted up with shelves tables and chairs. She was capably assisted by the hospital authorities and the American library association.
Wyeth spent most of her professional life in Savannah, Georgia, where there is a branch library bearing her name.
This portrait of Ola Wyeth was painted by Savannah artist Christopher Murphy in the early 1970s.
The war service of Zeta’s Tau Alpha’s Grand President, Dr. May Agness Hopkins, has always fascinated me. Hopkins was born in Austin, Texas on August 18, 1883. She graduated from the University of Texas in 1906, the same year the Kappa Chapter of Zeta Tau Alpha was founded. May Bolinger (Orgain) was a member of ZTA’s Epsilon Chapter at the University of Arkansas. There were four other NPC groups at the University of Texas, but Bolinger wanted a Zeta chapter in Austin. A friend told her that if she could get May Hopkins to help, her efforts would be successful. A lunch was arranged and by the end of lunch Hopkins had agreed to help organize a Zeta chapter, even though she was a senior. The installation of the chapter took place in Hopkins’ home. A month after graduation, Hopkins attended Zeta’s 1906 Knoxville convention. She left convention as Grand Secretary. In 1908, while attending medical school at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, she was elected Grand President.
In 1911, Hopkins received her medical degree and she was the lone woman in her graduating class. She completed an internship at Boston’s New England Hospital for Women and Children and a residency at Pennsylvania State Hospital. In 1912, she opened a pediatrics practice in Dallas.
During World War I, she offered her services and “her call came shortly before the 1918 Grand Chapter meeting and prevented her attendance there, but she sent her suggestions and recommendations, and while the meeting was in progress she was busily engaged in closing her office and making all preparations for going into – she knew not what.” She tendered her resignation as a Grand Chapter member, but it was not accepted; instead, she was granted a leave of absence.
Her response to the leave of absence was printed in the Themis, ZTA’s magazine:
To my sisters in Zeta Tau Alpha: When I received the resolution of my co-workers of Grand Chapter expressing their appreciation of my work, my heart simply filled to overflowing and I now am unable to find words with which to express my appreciation of your thoughtfulness. But I do wish you to know this: If I have been able to serve my fraternity with the least degree of efficiency; and through it to serve my sisters at large, it has only been through the untiring and loyal support you have given me as my co-officers and co-workers. It is true that our beloved fraternity has grown and through it I have grown – but you have been the power behind the throne. To you I give all the praise, all the honor. For myself, I can only say, ‘May I live to serve you and those I love again.’
In lieu of the identification bracelet worn by all war workers, she wore a gold band bracelet with the Greek letters “ZTA.” It was a gift given to her by Omicron Chapter when it was installed in 1911 at Breanau University in Gainesville, Georgia. Her name was already engraved on the inside and she added her address to it. The bracelet, “was a bit of Zeta Tau Alpha that went with her through all her war-time experiences.”
Dr. May Agness Hopkins in uniform
