The 1918-19 catalogue of Wesleyan College states “No student under any circumstances will be allowed to join a sorority or other secret society.” Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, was the founding home of Alpha Delta Phi and Phi Mu. Yet by 1918, neither organization had an active chapter at the college.
Alpha Delta Pi was founded as the Adelphean Society in 1851. It took on Greek letters in 1905 and joined what it today the National Panhellenic Conference in 1909. Phi Mu was founded as the Philomathean Society in 1852. It took on Greek letters in 1904 and became a member of NPC in 1911. That year a chapter of Zeta Tau Alpha was installed on the campus. It was followed by a chapter of Delta Delta Delta in 1913. What happen between 1904 when Phi Mu took on Greek letters and 1917 when the Veterropt, Wesleyan’s yearbook, noted “sororities are dead” at the college? They “passed away very suddenly in the spring of nineteen fourteen, and for three long years they have been lying in state in their respective halls. The final interment will take place this commencement with the passing of the nineteen seventeen sisters.”
Wesleyan’s website mentions concerns in the early 1900s about “the impact the sororities were having on the student body.” The early 1900s was when the two societies took on Greek letters and it would seem that the faculty was against this move. The August 1912 Adelphean told of the resignation on the organization’s Historian, Newell Mason, a Wesleyan faculty member. According to the report:
College authorities are violently opposed to sororities. The faculty’s opposition recently took the form of an edict that no teacher or instructor at the college should enter the hall of a sorority of which she is a member. The records of ADP since 1851 are in the sorority’s hall at Wesleyan, but since Miss Mason has been barred by the mandate of the powers from access to the hall and the records, her work as historian has been made most difficult. As the records cannot be moved from the hall, Miss Mason has decided that in justice to the sorority and to herself it is best that she resign in favor of some sister, who will not be hampered by a faculty prejudiced against college secret organizations.
On March 25, 1914, Ann Octavia Nickelson Bass, wife of the former president of the college, Rev. William Capers Bass, died. An Alpha Delta Phi history written in 1929 includes a 1914 report of its Alpha chapter. Mrs. Bass was not an Adelphean, but she was an honorary member of the society. She helped “in the fight against sororities a few years ago, her allegiance to our cause had a great weight with the trustees of Wesleyan.” With her voice no longer able to provide support, the trustees seemed to make their move.
A report of the Zeta Tau Alpha chapter in a 1914 Themis notes:
Pan-Hellenic is also up in arms against the recent ruling our of sororities at Wesleyan. At our last meeting we passed a resolution to take the matter up and fight for a reversal of their decision. One of the Wesleyan trustees told us it would be worthwhile for us to try it.
The June 4, 1914 issue of the Tuskegee News tells of the death of sororities at Wesleyan College. According to the article, the trustees had been working to abolish the organizations for ten years. A vote had been taken at the trustees meeting in Macon. The board was “found to be practically unanimous in favoring that course.”
The Wesleyan website reiterates that the trustees, “acting on faculty recommendation, voted to end all social sororities on campus.” They prohibited the creation of any new chapters. Initiated members were allowed to continue meeting until graduation. When the last members graduated in 1917, the sororities were gone from Wesleyan College.
Postscript
And although a number of NPC organization were founded at women’s colleges, their place there was problematic. The July 1914 Banta’s Greek Exchange has an article about the Wesleyan situation which begins, “May would seem to be the month when anti-sorority germ gets in its deadliest work. A year ago it was Barnard sorority life that fell under its blight; this year it is Wesleyan’s.”
Alpha Omicron Pi was founded at Barnard College, the women’s coordinate of Columbia University (in the late 1800s and early 1900s, creating a coordinate college for women was the way older men’s schools got around admitting women). In 2011, AOPi installed a chapter at Columbia University giving it the Alpha designation since women are now admitted to Columbia. Barnard College is still a women’s college, but Barnard women can join the Columbia sororities. The Barnard situation of 1913 deserves its own post and its on my list.
Goucher College in Baltimore had one of the largest sorority systems at a women’s college. When the campus moved from the city to Towson, Maryland, in the early 1950s, the sororities were not invited to make the move.
