Irene Roberta Price, Alpha Delta Pi, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 12, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Irene Roberta Price was born on November 28, 1900 and grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina. She entered Trinity College, following in her sister Grace’s footsteps. The Omicron Chapter of Alpha Delta Pi was founded on the Trinity College (now Duke University) campus on June 2, 1911. The Price sisters were members of the chapter.

Irene Price began painting when she was a young woman. A member of the class of 1922, Irene she served as president of Alpha Delta Pi.

During her undergraduate days, as manager of the Alpha Delta Pi tearoom for a fundraiser, she “was a veritable Jack-of-all-trades, and showed her efficient equally in bottle washing and auctioneering.” She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and she graduated magna cum laude.

A lovely description of Irene Roberta Price

After graduation she taught French at Carolina College. In 1924, she gave up teaching to go to Washington, DC to attend the Corcoran School of Art.  She spent four years there and also studied during the summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Price returned to North Carolina and opened a studio.

Price exhibited works in local galleries and was very active in the arts community. Portraiture was one of her specialties. She painted a portrait of Dr. W. K. Boyd, President of Trinity College as well as one of Susie Marshall Sharp, the first woman elected chief justice of a state supreme court in the United States when she was elected chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1974.

Dr W. K. Boyd, President of Trinity College, portrait by Irene Price

William Henry Glasson

Price died on July 23, 1971 and is buried in North Carolina.

Photo from Leland Little

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Elizabeth Finch West, Kappa Delta, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 11, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Elizabeth Finch West became a member of the Sigma Delta Chapter of Kappa Delta at Trinity College (now part of Duke University). She was only at the college for a year, but an obituary in the Duke University Alumni Register noted that “during that one year she endeared herself to all who knew her.”

In the fall of 1921, The Angelos of Kappa Delta reported that she was an assistant at her father’s hospital. Dr. Adam Tyree Finch, Sr. started the Chase City Hospital; it was private with 25 beds, a laboratory and x-ray machine.

She also studied and graduated from Tucker’s Sanitarium in Richmond, Virginia. In 1926, she was a Registered Nurse and was superintendent of the Chase City Hospital. After her father’s hospital closed shortly before his death, she became superintendent of nurses at the Grandy Sanitarium in Norfolk, Virginia. She worked there until her marriage to Phillip Bevington West on Monday, September 7, 1936.

The bride wore a navy ensemble with an orchid corsage. She was escorted by her brother Dr. Adam Tyree Finch, Jr. and the ceremony was performed by her brother, the Reverend Will Carrington Finch. Her sister, Mary, a missionary, was home from Hiroshima, Japan, and was her only attendant. After the ceremony, which took place in her family’s home, there was an informal reception for 70 friends and family.

Her doctor brother was starting a new hospital in Chase City and she assisted him in whatever ways she could. She divided her time between between Norfolk, where her husband was a lawyer, and in Chase City where she could help her community. In early 1938 she became pregnant. What should have been a joyous occasion turned tragic.

The death certificate for Mrs. Elizabeth Finch West is signed by the attending physician A. Tyree Finch, her brother. A caesarean section was performed on October 1; Betty Carrington West died the same day as her birth. The cause of West’s death is listed as late toxemia pregnancy along with severe abruptio placentae, complete anuria and complete uremia. Her kidneys failed and she died on October 6, 1938, at the age of 36.

The Chase City Progress newspaper said of her in an editorial:

What emotions, memories, thoughts, and the simple statement of her home going awakens in the minds and hearts of Chase City, no one can know. We cannot list her many contributions to our community, for there is scarcely one of us whom she did not serve faithfully, efficiently, and joyously. However, our gratitude extends far beyond the actual work she did for us. It is rather for the charm, the humor and the spirit of her service, that we would be grateful. And in this moment of mingled sorrow and triumph, a new inspiration is born, which will lead us one step further to the splendid reality of fine living which was exemplified her abundant life.

The Chase City Women’s Club at its December 1936 meeting resolved that the club would sponsor a memorial for West. It would provide funds to care for the undernourished children in Chase City.

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Carole Ashkinaze, Pi Beta Phi, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 10, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Carole Ashkinaze was raised in Malverne, New York on Long Island. It was said she wanted to be a journalist from the time she was in grade school and worked on a camp newsletter. Like many Long Islanders, she went to college in upstate New York. During her years at St. Lawrence University she became a member of Pi Beta Phi. She was one of the chapter’s first Jewish members.*

After graduation in 1966, she entered the Columbia University School of Journalism for a Master’s degree. While working for the Long Island newspaper Newsday, she shared in a 1970 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of political corruption on Long Island.

From 1976 until 1989, she worked for the Atlanta Journal Constitution.  She was the first woman to serve on the newspaper’s editorial board. The Editor’s column in the Fall 1985 Arrow of Pi Beta Phi had this shout out:

Congratulations to one of our own Atlanta Alumnae Club members, Carole Ashkinaze, New York Gamma, an editorial associate with the Atlanta Constitution. Carole took second place for the Best Personal Column-Serious Subject in the 1984 Georgia Press Association’s annual awards.

An article in the Spring 1987 Arrow reported that she was presented with a St. Lawrence Alumni Citation. Ashkinaze visited the chapter house:

She still sings those Pi Phi songs with enthusiasm. She spoke of the football games in the snow with the SAEs and of other traditions that have changed through the years. She toured through the house, speaking of memories and people far removed from the present…She hadn’t been to New York Gamma in twenty years and enjoyed talking to the sisters, teaching them some songs they didn’t know and even digging up her old history. She spoke fondly of her years at SLU and with warmth of her Pi Phi memories.

Her professional life was devoted to civil liberties and the causes of women. Devoted to making the world a better place, she championed the Equal Rights Amendment.

She coauthored several books, one with President Jimmy Carter, with whom she closely worked on several projects. She served on the Chicago Sun-Times’ editorial board. The last part of her professional career was spent in New York and Washington as an author and media strategist. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, she served as a a consultant to the American Civil Liberties Union

Her newspaper columns are in the Women’s History Archives at Georgia State University. She received the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood and the “EMMA” (Exceptional Merit Media Award) from the National Women’s Political Caucus.

Ashkinaze married widower Irving Kay when she was 63 years old. The couple settled in Atlanta. She died at the age of 71 in 2016.

*She took part in an oral history about being Jewish at St. Lawrence in the 1960s and that’s where the reference to her religion was found.

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Beryl Bonner Meyers, Chi Omega, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 9, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Beryl Bonner Meyers was born in Leadville, Colorado and attended the University of Colorado. There she became a member of the Zeta Chapter of Chi Omega. She was the second woman to graduate from the University of Colorado’s law school.

Beryl Bonner married Joseph Lawrence Meyers, a mining engineer, on May 7, 1918. They lived most of their married life in Utah and Idaho. She first worked in the county assessor’s office in Salt Lake City. In 1927, she was selected as the lone woman on the four member Utah Code Commission. They spent six years revising, annotating and cross referencing Utah’s laws. She was then tasked with setting up a state liquor commission.

Meyers was the first female attorney to be admitted to practice before the U.S. District Court in Utah, the first woman admitted to practice before the Department of Interior’s U.S. Land Office in Salt Lake City and the first to serve in Utah as a city judge and as a city attorney. The city was Midvale, Utah.

She was active in many organizations including AAUW, Business Professional Women’s Club, League of Women Voters, Soroptimist and American Legion Auxillary. Musically inclined, she served on the board of Idaho State Federation of Music Clubs.

Her formula for success was quoted in a 1965 newspaper article, “Any woman who wants to succeed in a man’s world has to study and work a little harder than the men she is competing with.”

Meyers died on September 20, 1965, at the age of 75.

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Ada Lou Reed Duacsek, Alpha Chi Omega, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 8, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Ada Lou Reed Duacsek was born in 1925. A friend of her father had an small plane and she was hooked on flying before she could drive a car. Duacsek attended San Jose State University where she became a member of Alpha Chi Omega.

The only female in the Operational Aviation program, the program shut down during World War II, when the men in the program were sent to Army or Navy flight schools. Duacsek spent two and half years working at the Naval Air Station in Alameda as a flight instrument technician. Her nights were spent as a Stage Door Canteen hostess in San Francisco. Duacsek graduated in 1949 and tried to find a job flying planes.

Being a woman pilot in the early 1950s was not easy. Job offers were not forthcoming when it was discovered she was a woman. So she tried the Navy, because women were provided equal pay. She was one of three women among the 450 or so men taking entrance exams. She was in the third regular commission WAVE class. However, women were not allowed to be Naval pilots. She reported to duty in Glenview, Illinois, on January 1, 1950.

She earned a degree in aerology, a combination of meteorology and oceanography, from the Naval Postgraduate School of Monterey. There she met a Navy man, Lt. Anthony Duacsek, who would become her husband.

She was then assigned to Moffett Field in California, where she was on 24-hour watch to clear flight operations. When they decided to have a family, Duacsek was honorably discharged because married women with children were not allowed to be on active duty.

Duacsek became a military wife and mother to three daughters. The family moved several times following her husband’s career. Wherever she was, she would make use of her skills to make the community a better place. She helped develop hurricane evacuations plans and had a hand in helping with Operation Baby Lift in 1975. She volunteered more than 5,000 hours for the Navy Marine Corps Relief Society.

Duacsek was a Life Loyal member of Alpha Chi Omega. She died on November 21, 2021, at the age of 96.

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Dr. Aldora Tyler, Kappa Alpha Theta, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 7, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Dr. Aldora Tyler spent almost her entire life in Clinton, Illinois. Born on April 20, 1862, she became a member of the Delta Chapter of Kappa Alpha Theta in 1881. At that time, the Delta Chapter was located at Illinois Wesleyan University. Kappa Alpha Theta transferred the charter to  the University of Illinois in 1895.

The daughter of a doctor, Tyler entered the Woman’s Medical College of Chicago (also known as the Northwestern Woman’s Medical School). She served as president of her medical school class. After graduation, she interned at the Woman’s Hospital in Chicago.

“Dr. Dora,” as she was known, practiced with her father, Dr. J.H. Tyler.

Clinton Register, July 27, 1888

The May 29, 1891 Clinton Public newspaper reprinted this tidbit from the St. Louis Chronicle, “Mayor Magill, of Clinton, Ill., appointed the only woman physician in that town, Dr. Aldora Tyler, President of the City Board of Health. He must adore Aldora.”

Tyler was active in county and state medical societies and was for many years the only woman physician in DeWitt county. In 1894 she did post-graduate work in New York City. A few years later she studied for a time in Chicago.

Clinton Register, July 12, 1889

On December 5, 1895, she and seven other Clinton women founded P.E.O.’s second chapter in Illinois – Chapter B, Clinton. One of the first things the chapter did was to establish a library in Clinton. She served as president of the P.E.O. chapter in 1901-02 and 1904-07.

A book on DeWitt residents published in 1901 describes her thusly:

She has a large consulting practicing and is the family physician in many a  household. Deep and earnest is her interest in her profession, arising from a love of scientific research and from a sympathetic nature, without which the physician is never truly a success. Her skill in general medicine is marked and she devotes special attention to the diseases of women and children.  In social circles Dr. Tyler is also widely and favorably known. She has many warm friends throughout the county, gained outside of professional life and her broad mind and interesting conversation render her a favorite in those gatherings where intellect and true worth are received as passports.

In March of 1900 she visited one of her medical school friends Dr. Naomi Pierce Clinton. An obituary published a few weeks later told of Clinton’s death from an recent illness. Perhaps that illness was the reason for her medical school classmate’s visit.

Tyler practiced medicine for more than 50 years. Medical society, P.E.O. and other civic organizations helped round out her busy days as a small town physician. She died on June 7, 1941, after suffering a stroke.

The home in Clinton in which Tyler died.

I regret I was unable to find a picture of “Dr. Dora.”

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Mary Antorietto McKay, Theta Phi Alpha, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 6, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Mary Antorietto McKay was  born in Italy on January 1, 1897. Her family immigrated to the United States and settled in Athens, Ohio. She graduated from high school in Athens and enrolled at Ohio University. There she became a member a charter member of the Delta Chapter of Theta Phi Alpha in June 1919. She was the chapter’s first president.

As a student she was Secretary/Treasurer of the School Administration Club and that may have had a bearing on the direction of her future. She graduated with a B.S. degree in 1920.

She remained at Ohio University working as an assistant registrar and university recorder. In 1944, she earned a master’s degree and is listed as part of the Arts and Sciences faculty in the 1945 yearbook.

1945 Ohio University yearbook

She served as a member of Theta Phi Alpha’s Grand Council from 1921-1923. A snippet in the Athens paper in June 1930, noted that she, Marie Josten and Melba Harwick were heading to the Theta Phi Alpha convention in Ann Arbor.

After her retirement from Ohio University, she moved to Florida. In December 1964, she married Reginald Reynolds McKay. They had nine years together before his death in 1973.

Travelling was a hobby and she visited all the state capitals in the 48 continental United States. She enjoyed playing bridge and was an active member of the Audubon Society.

McKay died on December 23, 2003 at the age of 106. She donated her body to science.

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Carlotta Corpron, Alpha Sigma Alpha, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 5, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Although Carlotta Corpron was born in Blue Earth, Minnesota, she spent her formative years in India, where her doctor father was a medical missionary.  In 1920, she returned to the United States and became a student at Michigan State Normal College in Ypsilanti, Michigan (now Eastern Michigan University). There she became a member of a local organization named Zeta Tau Alpha (no relation to the NPC organization of the same name). When the local became the Mu Mu Chapter of Alpha Sigma Alpha, Corpron was one of the charter members.

She attended the 1926 Alpha Sigma Alpha convention held at the Hotel Sherman in Chicago. She also served as Supervisor of Tabernacle, a national office. After graduation from MSNC she headed to New York City to study fabric design and art education at the Teacher’s College of Columbia University. She is listed as the ex-collegio secretary of Mu Mu Chapter and her address is 122th Street in NYC. After getting her Master’s, she started teaching.

Her first teaching job was at the Women’s College of Alabama (now Huntingdon College). In 1928, she moved to Ohio to take a job at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Applied Art. The 1933 Alpha Sigma Alpha magazine lists her as lost with a last known address in Cincinnati. That year, she purchased her first camera.

That camera, with real film, was used to take pictures of her students’ artwork. When preparing to teach a photography class, she went to Los Angeles to refine her photographic techniques. Her earliest works began with abstractions and patterns in nature forms. This was achieved by the overlapping of negatives.

In 1935, she moved to Denton, Texas, where she took a job at Texas State College for Women (now Texas Woman’s University). She kept learning and refining photographic techniques. Corpron was included in an “Abstraction in Photography exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1950s. She retired in 1967 and continued to live in Denton.

Corpron retired from TWU in 1967. The San Francisco Museum of Art’s 1975 “Women of Photography: An Historical Survey” included her work. That exposure led to her photographs being  featured in exhibitions at museums and galleries across the country. These include the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Her personal archives were given to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Texas.

She died on April 17, 1988 at the age of 86.

 

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Clara Backus Floyd Gehan, Phi Mu, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 4, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Phi Mu was founded on January 4, 1852 at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. It was riginally known as the Philomathean Society. It was founded by Mary DuPont (Lines), Mary Myrick (Daniel) and Martha Hardaway (Redding) and it was publicly announced on March 4, 1852, the day that is celebrated as Founders’ Day. On August 1, 1904, the group received a charter from the state of Georgia and was established as Phi Mu Fraternity. The second chapter was founded at Hollins College in 1904. Phi Mu joined the National Panhellenic Conference in 1911.

Clara Backus Floyd Gehan was born in Florida on September 10, 1909. She graduated from Gainesville High School at the age of 16  and enrolled in Brenau College (now University) in Gainesville, Georgia. According to her obituary, she was a member of Phi Mu, but there is a story behind that.

A Phi Mu chapter had been established at Brenau in 1910, but she was not a member of that chapter when she was a student. A local organization, Delta Phi Sigma, became the Omicron Chapter of Alpha Delta Theta in 1928. Gehan was likely a charter member of the chapter. However, after Gehan’s graduation, when the Alpha Delta Theta national organization merged with Phi Mu in 1939, the respective chapters at Brenau became one. Hence her Alpha Delta Theta chapter became a part of the Phi Mu chapter.

She was able to do her undergraduate work in three years by taking summer courses at the University of Florida. Although UF was a men’s school, women, mainly  teachers, were allowed to take courses during the summer. After graduating from Brenau, Gehan was asked to teach Latin at Gainesville High School. Because it was during the Depression and she couldn’t find a job that better fit her abilities, she took it. Her first day as a teacher was the day she turned 20. She added, “I got along very well with the eighth grade Latin students, because I could study ahead of them,” but things were a bit trickier with her third-year Latin students.

Although women were legally allowed to attend the University of Florida College of Law, they were usually dissuaded from doing so. But Gehan’s chance encounter with a law professor and subsequent permission from the dean as well as a very understanding supervisor at the high school made it happen. Her first day was a memorable one and she described it in an oral history she recorded for the University of Florida:

I shall never forget the first day that I entered law school. Apparently, the boys knew I was coming. I think my first class was at ten o’clock. As I walked up the walk—the boys who had a habit of coming out between classes and standing on the steps. Smoke a cigarette, take a little break – and as they saw me coming, they just divided into two lines and let me walk between right up the steps and then through the little entrance hallway and into the classroom and nobody said a word. And I didn’t say a word. But I never felt so conspicuous in all my life. It gave me a great deal of empathy for the little black children who were integrating the schools in the mid-sixties.

In 1933, she was the UF College of Law’s first matriculate, graduating with honors and with the highest GPA of her class. But she was unable to find paid employment as a lawyer. She worked for no pay for a while as well as a stint as a legal secretary.

In 1943 she married Frederick Gehan, a Phi Kappa Tau fraternity brother of one of her employers. He was stationed in Utah during the war and she joined him there. Their only child, Julia, was born in Utah.  The family returned to Gainesville and she worked for two firms before setting out on her own practice. Her specialty was probate and real estate law. A firm believer in service, she was a Director of the local bar association for more than three decades. She taught Legal Ethics at her the University of Florida Law School.

In 1963, she was integral in establishing an organization providing legal aid to those who could not afford it.  The Storefront Legal Aid Service came about because she and a group of lawyers:

decided that something had to be done to furnish legal aid to the poor and the bar association had made only a gesture, a very feeble gesture, for several years. So we began to argue about it. With the help of Dean Frank Maloney at the law school and a series of rather amusing coincidences we managed to get a legal aid and defender clinic established at the law school, which has been an excellent teaching and learning device and also has been a great service to the community in general. 

That same year she was appointed to the Gainesville Advisory Bi-Racial Committee and served as chair. She encouraged local businesses to desegregate. She later said that the work on the committee was the most challenging and most interesting work she did.

Gehan was the recipient of many awards including Distinguished Alumna Awards from Brenau and University of Florida. She died in 1992, but set up the Floyd-Gehan Scholarship for Alachua County residents to attend UF College of Law.

Clara Backus Floyd Gehan

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Arizona Cleaver Stemons, Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHW2022

Posted on March 3, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Arizona Cleaver (Stemons), along with her four friends, Pearl Neal, Myrtle Tyler, Viola Tyler, and Fannie Pettie, are the five pearls of Zeta Phi Beta. They are the organization’s founders. The idea for the organization happened several months earlier when Cleaver was walking with Charles Robert Samuel Taylor, a Phi Beta Sigma at Howard University. Taylor suggested that Cleaver consider starting a sister organization to Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc.

Although there were already two sororities on the Howard University campus, Cleaver and her four friends were interested and started the process. They sought and were granted approval from university administrators. The five met for the first time as a sanctioned organization on January 16, 1920. They named their organization Zeta Phi Beta. It is the only National Pan-Hellenic Council sorority constitutionally bound to a fraternity; that fraternity is Phi Beta Sigma.

The Five Pearls of Zeta Phi Beta, (l-to-r) Arizona Cleaver Stemons, Viola Tyler Goings, Pearl Anna Neal, Myrtle Tyler Faithful, and Fannie Pettie Watts

Arizona C. Stemons Way

Zeta Phi Beta’s Centennial celebration was a grand affair. How fortuitous that it took place before the word “covid” dominated American life. One of the many events leading up to the big day involved the street upon which a Founder lived. On March 21, 2019, the Philadelphia City Council passed a resolution to name the 1900 block of Federal Street in Philadelphia Arizona C. Stemons Way. Her former home at 1915 Federal Street is owned by the Beta Delta Zeta Chapter  of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Inc. Its front door is painted the distinctive Zeta Phi Beta blue.

Stemons was the sorority’s first President and was named President Emerita. She spent her career as a social worker for the Philadelphia Department of Public Welfare.

October 31-November 2, 1947, Arizona Stemons is seated in the first row on the left.

Stemons founded the Beta Delta Zeta Chapter in Philadelphia. It was chartered on October 14, 1944 and is the Philadelphia Graduate Chapter. It is the only Zeta Phi Beta chapter that owns the home of a Founder. The chapter sponsors the five undergraduate chapters at Temple University, Lincoln University, University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University and LaSalle University.

​She died in March 1980 and is buried in Philadelphia alongside her husband.

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