In 1919, Ethel R. Dockum-Shaw wrote to the Sigma Kappa Triangle sharing information about her biological and Sigma Kappa sister, Clara Dockum. According to Ethel, Clara started with Theta Chapter at the University of Illinois in 1908 and graduated from
Epsilon Chapter at Syracuse University in 1918. During those ten years, she was “investigating various sides of the field of social work, serving two years under the New York Civil Service with the Public Charities of the city of Syracuse; a year and a half as Supervisor of Attendance, enforcing the Illinois State Compulsory Education Law, for the public and parochial schools of Springfield, Illinois; a year as director of the Peoria Children’s Bureau, Peoria, Illinois, and agent for the Illinois Children’s Home and
Aid Society with headquarters in Chicago, Illinois.”
March 1915 Sigma Kappa Triangle
Clara sailed for Brest, France, in January 1919, to work for the Y.W.C.A. She began her work that February. In August she went to Paris and took charge of the dining room of one on the largest Y.W.C.A. huts in the city, at the Oxford and Cambridge Hotel.
December 1919
And at a small town in France, two young women were sitting “opposite each other
at one end of the long table, suddenly uttered an astonished exclamation and, to the amazement of their neighbors, joyously shook hands across the table. Each had just discovered that the other was wearing a Sigma Kappa pin. They were Clara Dockum and Mary Newcomb, until then unaware of the bond between them, as fraternity pins were not supposed to be worn with their uniforms.”
In October 1919, Clara wrote her family, “Just a line in haste to tell you the latest news – I leave in about two weeks for Warsaw, Poland, to be supervisor of case work in Child Welfare under the Polish Government and also with the American Y.W.C.A. It is an interesting undertaking but not easy. I’m half scared, half glad, and full of funny sensations over it all. Of course there is a war going on in Poland and starvation and freezing are prevalent among the refugees gathered there. The whole thing is mighty interesting but not getting me home as soon as I planned, probably not until January, 1921.”
Shortly after she returned to the United States, she married Jared Howell Van Auken, an alumnus of Amherst College who graduated from the law school at the University of Michigan.
She was one of the founders of Sigma Kappa’s Detroit Alumnae Chapter. In 1948, the alumnae chapter celebrated 25 years and honored the women who came together to form the it.
In 1936, 1940, and 1944, she was a Michigan delegate to the Democratic National Convention, at a time when it was rare for a woman to take that role in politics. She resigned shortly before the 1948 convention.
Clara Dockum Van Auken, circa 1948
She died in 1977 at the age of 86.
