In 1897, Evalina “Eva” Orrick Bandel graduated from the Woman’s College of Baltimore before it changed its name to Goucher College. During her years there, she joined the Zeta Chapter of Alpha Phi. After graduation, her plans were to study at Oxford during the summer and she traveled through England and Scotland.
On November 17, 1897, she married John Glover Wilson, a Princeton University alumnus, who graduated at the top of his class. According to an account in The Alpha Phi Quarterly, it “was distinctively an Alpha Phi wedding; front seats at the church were reserved for the
chapter, the maid of honor and three of the bridesmaids were Alpha Phis, while the bride carried lilies of the valley.” Alumnae Ruth Adams, Jane Anderson, Grace Heisler, Katharine Baker, and Edith Wilson, attended the wedding and delighted the chapter by staying for initiation. In the summer of 1899, she gave birth to John, Jr. but the baby died six months later.
Sorores in Urbe were area alumnae.
John Glover Wilson was a lawyer. According to an account in a Princeton alumni publication, “he was a man of tireless industry and great capacity for details, with a logical and well-trained mind.” He spent most of his career as a railroad lawyer, representing the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company. The Wilsons were included in The Street Directory of Baltimore Society Visiting List, also known as The Blue Book. He died on April 7, 1908, from “cerebral spinal meningitis which attacked him a few days previously and which was attributed indirectly to over work.”
The Wilsons were friendly with another Wilson, namely Woodrow, a Phi Kappa Psi, who was President of Princeton University before he was President of the United States. While Eva was a student, Woodrow Wilson presented a series of 25 lecture histories at Johns Hopkins University, and from the chapter account in The Alpha Phi Quarterly and a scholarship establsihed at JHU, it sounds quite possible that she attended these lectures.
As a widow of means without children, Eva Bandel Wilson had more freedom than most women to chart her own course. She spent two years working as a newspaper correspondent in France, during and after World War I. She attended the Peace Conference as an accredited correspondent, a very big deal for a woman in 1919. Perhaps her acquaintance with President Wilson, helped in this regard.
An article written by her, “A Post-War Work Worthy of Alpha Phi’s Best” appeared in the January 1920 Alpha Phi Quarterly.
From my experience as correspondent accredited to the Peace Conference and since my return to America, I am convinced that a great duty lies before the women of this country in educating public opinion in foreign affairs.
We are facing new international responsibilities which our delay in ratifying the Versailles treaty only postpones. It cannot prevent our taking part in world affairs, for in this age there are no hermit nations and no nation liveth to itself.
So we must prepare to take an intelligent part. And to do this, women must shoulder the greater share of the burden. Men are largely occupied with business and what affects it most closely. Women must begin their political life with wider views. As guardians of the garbage cans in their respective communities they will doubtless justify the bestowal of the ballot upon them, but educated women must do far more they must study world conditions, they must form intelligent, enlightened opinions about America’s responsibilities toward the rest of the world, and they must exert their utmost influence to supply one of the greatest needs in our political life a trained body of people to carry on our contracts with other nations and a trained public opinion to judge them justly.
As means to this end, I suggest that Alpha Phis in every place they live see to it that:
Foreign affairs are given more space in their local papers, and are more widely studied in the schools, public and private, and in women’s clubs.
Eva Orrick Bandell Wilson
When she died in 1966, her will provided for the establishment of several scholarships and awards. The Eva Orrick Bandel Wilson 1897 Scholarship is given by Goucher College. The Wilson Memorial Scholarship was established at Johns Hopkins University, where she once attended classes in the Evening College.
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