The first social event Frances Haven (Moss) attended after enrolling in Syracuse University in 1874 was a church oyster supper. Her father, Dr. Erastus Otis Haven, was recently elected Chancellor of the university. At that supper, she met the man who would become her husband, Charles Melville Moss. She also met two members of Alpha Phi, a women’s fraternity founded at Syracuse in October of 1872. Instead of accepting the invitation to join Alpha Phi which had been offered to her, she joined with three other women – Mary A. Bingham (Willoughby), E. Adeline Curtis, and Helen M. Dodge (Ferguson) – and they founded an organization of their own. The date was November 11, 1874. The organization is Gamma Phi Beta, the first of the National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) organizations to use the term “sorority;” Syracuse Latin professor Frank Smalley suggested the word to the young women.
Edith Mahier
Edith Albina Mahier became a member of Gamma Phi Beta at the University of Oklahoma after she graduated from Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans. Her friends called her “Eli” and “Ely.”She graduated from Newcomb in 1916 and studied with Ellsworth Woodward. Mahier was proud of her Newcomb degree:
not only because Newcomb won the Grand Prize in the San Francisco Exposition but because of the faith I have in the work of that school and in its director Ellsworth Woodward who inspires one with the most wonderful spirit and enthusiasm and with even a sort of divine power. When ambition wanes I have only to think of Mr. Woodward, or those hallowed sports at Newcomb in order to dream dreams and to paint pictures.
After graduation, she worked as an illustrator for a New Orleans newspaper. She took a job teaching art at the University of Oklahoma in 1917. A letter to the Crescent of Gamma Phi Beta in 1921 included this information:
I was a ‘jack of all trades,’ while in the art school, doing various kinds of work from clay modeling to can labels but my favorite pastime is picture making. ‘The Fountain of Youth’ is a picture painted for Psi Chapter. Greek maidens are gathered about a fountain which embodies the spirit of the four founders. To the causal observer it is only a portrayal of youth and joy but to the imitate it contains all that we hold most dear. Little dancing figures appearing from and disappearing into a misty background represent the pledges and alumnae while those in the college chapter are gathered around the fountain.
The Crescent included some of her drawings that were part of a proposed mural for a bank.
She painted a mural above the fireplace in the University of Oklahoma Gamma Phi house, according to an account in a 1930 Crescent. While at Oklahoma she helped develop the talent of the Kiowa Six – the artists Spencer Asah, James Auchiah, Jack Hokeah, Stephen Mopope, Monroe Tsatoke and Lois Smoky.
She retired from teaching in 1963 and moved to Natchez, Mississippi to be near her sister. Mahier died in 1967.
