I’ve written several histories of fraternities and sororoites for the Society for the Preservation of Greek Housing. World War I took its toll on the Illinois campus and that came through in each of those 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.
Gladys Gilpatrick is in the bottom right hand corner in this photo of the Sigma Chapter of Alpha Delta Pi at the University of Illinois taken from the 1916 Illio.
In 1917 women could not yet vote in a federal election. They could not serve in the Armed Forces except in peripheral roles such as nurse, ambulance driver, telephone operator, etc.
Gilpatrick, who was from Plano, Illinois, began her post college career as a teacher. Wanting to help in the war effort, she attended a course 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 and 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 Alpha Delta Pi alumnae returned from towns outside of Champaign and Urbana. A good many local alums attended, too. 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.
