One of my favorite ways to waste time, and forgive me if I’ve said this before, is to page through fraternity and sorority magazines. Reading the old Arrows in the Pi Phi house was how I started down this path of Greek-letter organization history.
Last week, I came across a report of the 1915 National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) meeting held at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, California. The Panama–Pacific International Exposition took place in San Francisco that year, so it’s a good bet that some of the delegates visited the Exposition before or after the meeting. (Remember this was in 1915 and getting to Berkeley from Chicago or any eastern city meant several days aboard a train.) It is titled Morals and Dress:
Mrs. Mary C. Love Collins, national president of Chi Omega and that fraternity’s delegate to the NPC, as chairman of the NPC Committee on Conference with College Presidents, reports that on many of her visits to college presidents she was confronted with the questions, ‘Well what do you think of the dress of our young women of today?’ And ‘what do you think of their morals?’ To the former, Mrs. Collins replied that if the modern dress is open to severe criticism it is a sad commentary on the men of today. To the second question she replied that she believed their morals are better. Mrs. Collins backed up this statement with the fact that any age is judged by its accumulative contribution and that she believed that the young women of today in the process of their evolution from sequestered ignoramuses to intelligent young animals were making an accumulative contribution to the world which would be the ultimate judge of their morality.
While a student at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Mary Love belonged to a local organization, Omega Psi. In 1907, it became the Delta Chapter of Chi Omega. Mary Love, as she was known to her Chi Omega and NPC friends, was initiated into Chi Omega as an alumna. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and became a lawyer. She served as Chi Omega’s National President from 1910-52. Mary Love began her stint as Chi Omega’s NPC delegate in 1909 and she served as NPC Chairman of the 1919 meeting.
Omega Psi at Dickinson College. It came the Delta Chapter of Chi Omega in 1907. She is included in this photograph, middle row, left side. (photo courtesy of the Dickinson College Archives)
Mary Love Collins, 1914
Mary Love Collins at her cabin in Pennsylvania with her dog, “Frolic,” c 1932 (photo courtesy of the Chi Omega Archives)
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