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1 Of Serious Mind and Purpose: The First Generation of Fraternity Women
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Of Serious Mind and Purpose The First Generation of Fraternity Women On January 27, 1870, four women at Asbury College in Greencastle, Indiana, gathered together in a darkened room and initiated themselves into a secret society. Pledging lifelong vows of loyalty to one another and swearing to uphold a set of carefully outlined ideals, these four students conceived of and established Kappa Alpha Theta, the first Greek letter women’s fraternity.1 In creating Kappa Alpha Theta and establishing “chapters” of their organization on other newly coeducational campuses across the United States, the four women acted in response to opposition they faced from male students, faculty, and other critics of coeducation. Isolated and denigrated by those who both doubted their intellect and challenged their femininity, the founders of Kappa Alpha Theta recognized that if they bonded together and provided mutual aid to one another, their efforts might quell the hostility surrounding coeducation and carve a more permanent place for women within institutions of higher education. Such a feat entailed not only handling college work and thereby quieting the critics who claimed that women lacked the brains to learn at a high level, but also dampening fears that high-level learning would render women “unsexed.” Considering themselves and their fraternity sisters the most “worthy” female collegians, the founders and early members of Kappa Alpha Theta saw themselves as best suited among their peers to help assure women’s place on campus. Testing the elasticity of, but not breaking their allegiance to, Victorian notions of the “feminine ideal,” the early sisters of Kappa Alpha Theta strove to prove themselves the intellectual equals of men while at the same time continuing to fulfill the tenets of “true” and “noble womanhood.” How did they do so and to what ends? 1 13 In their efforts to establish a place for themselves on campus, the first generation of Theta sisters encountered challenges from all sides. How did the sisters of the 1870s and 1880s conceptualize their mission for Kappa Alpha Theta, and how did their aims evolve over these two decades? What beliefs did they draw from and react to, in shaping their identities as fraternity members, as collegians, and as women? To what extent did the founders of other female Greek-letter organizations share their experiences and their concerns? And how successful were the early fraternity women at performing the delicate balancing act required of them, as they strove to broaden but not dilute the tenets of “true womanhood ”?2 In 1870, only 11,000 women of the roughly 3,075,650 females between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one in America attended college. Male students outnumbered women by a ratio of nearly five to one. Despite the fact that Oberlin College had broken the barrier between the sexes thirtythree years earlier by opening its doors to both male and female students, an overwhelming majority of American colleges and universities still refused to admit women.3 The first female collegians to enroll in schools in the early years of coeducation thus constituted a tiny minority. Most often the daughters of college professors and other members of the educated elite, these “pioneering women” hailed mainly from middle-class families who could afford to pay the tuition and forgo the labor of their offspring.4 The passage of the Morrill Act of 1862, providing federal funds to states for the development of what came to be called Land Grant Colleges , helped pave the way for coeducation at both state-supported and private schools. By neither explicitly demanding nor prohibiting coeducation at the new schools, the act unintentionally invited debate over coeducation and opened up a forum in which could be heard the demands of tax-paying state residents who wanted their daughters educated.5 The states responded slowly, however, so that by 1867, only two state universities , Iowa and Wisconsin, had opened their doors to women. Three years later, when the four women of Asbury College founded Kappa Alpha Theta, fewer than one-third of the nation’s 582 colleges permitted women to matriculate.6 The promise of fuller classrooms and increased tuition dollars proved appealing to many colleges of the late nineteenth century, however, and the number of schools allowing women to enroll thus increased dramati14 | Of Serious Mind and Purpose [18.223.210.76] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:46 GMT) cally. While in 1870, only eight state universities admitted women, this number rose dramatically in the next two decades, as...