This post was originally written for Women’s History Month 2016. The link was broken so I am replacing it with this post. With it being football season, it just seems appropriate to highlight the only female with a pillar in her name at the University of Illinois’ Memorial Stadium.
I wrapped up writing the history of the Illinois Delta chapter of Phi Kappa Psi at the University of Illinois, one of several I’ve written for the Society for the Preservation of Greek Housing. World War I took its toll on the University of Illinois campus and that came through in each of these histories.
After the war’s end it was decided to build a stadium in honor of the students who left campus and perished in the war effort. Memorial Stadium was dedicated on October 18, 1924; it was the University’s 15th Homecoming. On the east and west sides of the stadium there are 200 columns; 183 of those columns display the name of a University of Illinois student or graduate who lost their life in World War I. All but one of those names belong to males. The sole woman who lost her life and who is memorialized with a pillar in the stadium is a 1917 graduate, Gladys Gilpatrick, who was an initiate of Sigma Chapter of Alpha Delta Pi.
Remember that in 1917 women could not yet vote in a federal election. Women could not serve in the Armed Forces except in peripheral roles, i.e., nurse, ambulance driver, telephone operator, and such.
Gilpatrick, who was from Plano, Illinois, began her post college career as a teacher. Wanting to help in the war effort, she attended a summer training for nurses at Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was in nurse’s training at Philadelphia General Hospital. There she came down with influenza. It developed into pneumonia. She died on October 12, 1918.
In the June 1919 Adelphean, Margaret Hill Pletcher, the Sigma chapter’s correspondent wrote:
We feel that Gladys was a war heroine, in spite of the fact that she didn’t go across. When taken ill she was studying nursing, preparatory to going ‘over there.’ Permission had been granted to the student nurses who so desired to return to their homes until after the epidemic, but Glad, characteristic of herself, stayed to give what help she could. Although we think of her death with the greatest sorrow, we are, nevertheless, very proud of her.
When Memorial Stadium was dedicated, 35 alumnae returned from towns outside of Champaign and Urbana, and a good many local Alpha Delta Pi alumnae attended. According to an account in the January 1925 Adelphean, Gilpatrick’s mother, father, and sister attended dinner at the chapter house and returned for a short visit after the dedication.
