Sisters, Sisters! Six of the 26 National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) women’s fraternities/sororities have a pair of real sisters among their founders.
Marguerite and Estelle Shepard were students at Syracuse University when they helped found Alpha Gamma Delta. The sisters were the ones who planted the seed for the formation of a new women’s fraternity on the Syracuse campus. They talked the idea over with a professor, Dr. Wellesley P. Coddington, recruited their friends, and founded Alpha Gamma Delta on May 30, 1904.
Helene and Adriance Rice were enrolled at Michigan State Normal College (now Eastern Michigan University) when they got together with six friends and created Alpha Sigma Tau on November 4, 1899. They and two other Alpha Sigma Tau founders roomed in the home of Mrs. Depew.
Frances and Almira Cheney were students at Lombard College in Galesburg, Illinois when they became founders of Alpha Xi Delta on April 17, 1893. Almira became an ordained minister in the Universalist Church. Frances left Lombard and graduated from Ryder Divinity School in 1895. When Frances died in 1901, she was serving as a rural pastor. Theirs were not conventional careers for women in the 1890s.
Phi Sigma Sigma’s founders include Ethel and Lillian Gordon. Only one organization, Theta Phi Alpha, has two sets of sisters among the founders – May and Camilla Ryan, and Katrina and Dorothy Caughey.
Clara and Emma Brownlee, along with ten friends, founded Pi Beta Phi at the home of Jacob Holt on First Avenue in Monmouth, Illinois, on April 28, 1867. Emma was the organization’s first president and Pi Beta Phi’s coat of arms is based on the Brownlee’s family’s coat of arms.
The Brownlee Family Coat of Arms (Above) and the Pi Beta Phi Coat of Arms (below)
© Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com, 2013. All Rights Reserved.
