Foundation from the archives
Dear Alpha Phi
Keeping in Touch with the Home Circle
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By Jenny Thompson (Alpha Lambda-Alumna Initiate)
Before e-mail, Skype and Facebook, setting a fountain pen to paper (there were no ball point pens yet) was the primary means by which Alpha Phi sisters remained “linked” as Founder Clara Bradley put it, “by fond affection’s chain.” Whether due to marriage, jobs or travel, many Alpha Phi sisters would be scattered across the country – from Iowa to California – just a few years after the Fraternity’s founding in 1872. So important was it to these early sisters that they should remain connected – even when separated by distance – that in the first decade of the Fraternity, it was a rule that “absent sisters” write to “the home circle” in Syracuse. To receive a letter was a highlight for those in the home circle, who devoured their sisters’ missives, reading them aloud in the weekly meetings. “I think of you by day and dream of you by night,” wrote Founder Grace Hubbell from her home in Rochester, N.Y. “Of all my memories of my college days, I can truly say of those connected with the ‘blue and golden room’ are the tenderest, those to which I look back with most longing.” From “the valley of starvation,” Founder Martha Foote Crow wrote in 1877, “I am actually starving for Alpha Phi news.” The sisters were thrilled to receive lengthy, handwritten letters – they were particularly fond, they remarked, of “newsy” letters. And in those days, frequent daily mail deliveries multiplied the potential that a valued letter from a sister might be received in the “morning mail” or “evening mail.”
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Alpha Phi Quarterly
WINTER 2011