• Founding of Omega Xi.pdf
  • This is a very interesting read.
  • Summary:
    • The author and ~18 other guys were living on the same floor for one year and then were able to somehow continue that for a second year.
    • They hosted two parties that got rave reviews, and someone said "This is so great up here, you guys are like your own independent fraternity!"
    • The author was interested in the perks involved in being a frat: intramural teams, social events, and most of all: sorority girls.
    • In the spring of his sophomore year he put posters all over campus inviting guys to a meeting to discuss the idea.
    • The only guys who showed up were the ones living on the floor (except for two).
    • He gave a 20-minute speech about the idea.
    • The only response was: "What you described sounds pretty good, but without a frat house it's just a club, and a club is lame. Find us a house and then you might have something."
    • Most of the article then describes the problems he had getting a house.
    • It became the third-largest fraternity at his University and lasted for ten years, it was "courted heavily by many national fraternities".
    • "Without a backer or mature alumni group, it did not survive."

• Wikipedia - Kappa Kappa Gamma

The idea of Kappa Kappa Gamma was conceived in a conversation between two college women, Mary Louise Bennett and Hannah Jeannette Boyd, on a wooden bridge over a stream on the Monmouth College campus in the late 1860s.[4] Though the coeducational college was considered progressive at the time, the women were dissatisfied with the fact that while men enjoyed membership in fraternities, women had few equivalent organizations for companionship, support, and advancement, and were instead limited to literary societies. Bennett and Boyd began to seek "the choicest spirits among the girls, not only for literary work, but also for social development",[4] beginning with their friend Mary Moore Stewart. Stewart, Boyd, and Bennett met around 1869 in the Amateurs des Belles Lettres Hall, a literary society of which the women were active members when they first decided to form a new society.[5] Soon after, they recruited three additional women, Anna Elizabeth Willits, Martha Louisa Stevenson, and Susan Burley Walker, to join in founding the fraternity.

The six founders met at the home of Anna Willits to lay the groundwork for the formation of the first chapter of Kappa Kappa Gamma, later known as the Alpha Chapter. It was there that they chose the golden key as their badge and prepared to make their official debut by ordering their badges from Lou Bennett's family jeweler. A formal charter was also drawn up by Minnie Stewart's father, who was an attorney in the state of Illinois.

The six founders declared their intention to organize as a women's fraternity when on October 13, 1870, they marched into the most public venue on Monmouth campus, the chapel, wearing their golden key badges in their hair. This day is nationally recognized by the fraternity as "Founders Day".

In 1871, the young fraternity expanded by chartering their Beta Chapter at nearby St. Mary's Seminary. (NW: So this was just a few months after starting the Alpha chapter.) The next year, the fraternity expanded again to Gamma Chapter at Smithson College and Delta Chapter at Indiana University. Though the Beta and Gamma chapters failed to survive more than a few years, the Delta chapter became the fraternity's oldest continuously active chapter (Alpha was closed in 1874 but later re-established) and contributed a great deal to the organization of the fraternity in its early years.

Since 1870, Kappa has continued to expand and has chartered 160 chapters, 138 of which are active today.