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.*
Frances Moss was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in Evanston, Illinois, as her father was associated with both the University of Michigan and Northwestern University. Although the Big 10 athletic conference was not in existence when she was in those two locales, she spent most of the rest of her life in a third Big 10 town, Urbana, Illinois, where her husband was on the faculty of the University of Illinois.
On May 24, 1913, the Omicron Chapter of Gamma Phi Beta was installed at the University of Illinois. The chapter was originally founded as a local organization, Phi Beta. Its intent, from the beginning, was to become a Gamma Phi Beta chapter. Frances Haven Moss and Violet Jayne Schmidt, a member of Gamma Phi’s Beta Chapter at the University of Michigan, took charge of the effort.
Petition books were created and sent to chapters and alumnae clubs for during the early 1900s, petition books were integral in the process by which local organizations were accepted into membership. Dr. Moss, as a faculty member, added a letter to the petition book endorsing Phi Beta’s efforts. The petition was approved. It was the only Gamma Phi chapter to be founded by one of Gamma Phi’s four founders. Alida Helen Moss, the Moss’ youngest daughter, became a member of the chapter. Alida is the only daughter of a Gamma Phi Beta founder to become a Gamma Phi herself. Frances and her husband helped the chapter obtain a house.
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*Dr. Frank Smalley and the word “sorority,”
Dr. Erastus Haven, the father of Frances
The history of Gamma Phi Beta, http://wp.me/p20I1i-6h. This link includes a picture of an early Gamma Phi house on Irving Avenue in Syracuse.
