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.
