A church oyster supper was the first social event Frances Haven (Moss) attended after enrolling in Syracuse University in 1874. Her father, Dr. Erastus Otis Haven, had been recently elected Chancellor of the university. At that supper, she met the man who would later become her husband, Charles Melville Moss. She also met two members of Alpha Phi, a women’s fraternity founded at Syracuse in October of 1872. Instead of accepting the invitation to join Alpha Phi which had been offered to her, she joined with three other women – Mary A. Bingham (Willoughby), E. Adeline Curtis, and Helen M. Dodge (Ferguson) – and they found an organization of their own. The date was November 11, 1874. The organization is Gamma Phi Beta, the first of the National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) organizations to use the term “sorority;” Syracuse Latin professor Frank Smalley suggested the word to the young women.
Since it is also the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, it’s an opportune time to tell the story of Charlotte Hoffman Kellogg, better known in the social language of the day as Mrs. Vernon Kellogg.
Charlotte Hoffman was an initiate of the Eta Chapter of Gamma Phi Beta at the University of California Berkeley. She graduated in 1900.
She was one of the speakers at a Panhellenic luncheon at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., in January of 1932. In her response to the “social and economic revolution we are living through, comes the serious questioning of the right of the sorority to exist,” and that because it was thought to be “an outgrowth of privilege and selfishness,” that it belonged to the past, she said:
As I listen to this charge, I am always amused to set against it my own mental picture of a sorority. I remember a sorority as a place where somebody without position, somebody without money, somebody living in a small third floor room, cooking her breakfast there (and often her supper) after an afternoon of teaching science in order to be able to cram university work into the mornings – a place where such a person found a healthily run home, needed books, music – a meeting spot for friends, a place whose influence extended to those marginal flowerings which drew parties into the ‘working-one’s-way-through’ day. …A sudden invitation – widths of white organdy quickly purchased – Lillian – a machine humming from 3 till 7 – Virginia – an American beauty rose – the beau – the dance – enough thrill to carry science teaching for weeks! In other words, the term sorority in my mind connotes those very things – food, shelter, clothing, happiness, which are the goal of present seeking.
In my own mind the sorority is more akin to the Salvation Army than to institutions of selfishness and privilege ! I am convinced that it is only along lines suggested by this memory of mine that the sorority will live, in the world now in the making.
Charlotte Kellogg and her daughter Jean
Her husband Vernon Kellogg, an entomologist, was on the faculty at Stanford University. She started out as the chairman of the Belgium relief committee at Stanford, and, in 1915, moved up to the position of organizing secretary of the California State Committee. That year, her husband became director of relief work in occupied France and then Brussels. In 1916, Charlotte headed to Belgium. President Woodrow Wilson, Phi Kappa Psi, appointed her to the Commission for Belgian Relief. She spent six months there. Upon her return to the U.S, her book Women of Belgium Turning Tragedy to Triumph was published. She was the only woman on the Commission for Belgian Relief and through her work and the books and magazine articles she wrote, she became known internationally.
A 1918 Crescent of Gamma Phi Beta said this of her:
If you ask Charlotte Kellogg to tell you something of her own achievements, she will answer you in this fashion, ‘It is much more important to get the Gamma Phi Betas started on the milk bottle work than to write an article about me,’ and if the dear lady only realized it, she has revealed in these words the secret of her success. For she has given of herself so wholly, so disinterestedly, so enthusiastically to the cause of Belgium; she has labored so tirelessly for its welfare ; she has placed its interests so far above own, that unconsciously she has become the central figure in the movement for its relief.
Because of her encouragement, Gamma Phi Beta began a Milk Bottle Campaign to help raise funds for Belgian relief.
The milk bottles of Gamma Phi Beta’s milk bottle fundraising campaign. This effort by Gamma Phi took place in theater lobbies where the general public could contribute by putting spare change in the milk bottles.
This appeared in an Arrow of Pi Beta Phi.
