Delta Delta Delta was founded at Boston University on November 28, 1888, which fell on the day before Thanksgiving that year. In the fall of 1888, four senior women, who had not joined any of the three women’s fraternities then at Boston University discussed their situation. Eleanor Dorcas Pond ([Mann, M.D.) talked to Sarah Ida Shaw (Martin) and they decided to start a society of their own. Pond suggested that they use a triple Greek letter and Shaw chose the Greek letter Delta. Shaw also developed the mottoes and passwords.
All was finished by Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, 1888, but the two met again on Wednesday afternoon, before leaving for the holiday. They met in the Philological Library at the top of the college building. Shaw and Pond embraced and said “Tri Delta is founded.”
Shaw and Pond were intent on getting the other two unaffiliated seniors to join their organization. Florence Stewart quickly agreed, but Isabel Breed took a little more convincing due to her highly religious nature. When she was given the job of chaplain, she relented and joined her friends. The four are considered founders. Soon they were joined by three juniors, five sophomores, and six freshmen. These women were initiated at the Joy Street home of Emily F. Allen on January 15, 1889.
In 1889, Tri Delta’s Epsilon chapter became the second women’s fraternity at Knox College. Kappa Beta Theta was a local organization founded in 1888 by sisters Patsie and Ola Ingersoll. Beta Theta Pi had a chapter at Knox College and a Knox Beta told his brother, who was a member of the Beta Theta Pi chapter at Boston University. The Boston University Beta gave the information to his friend, Delta Delta Delta founder Sarah Ida Shaw. Shaw began correspondence with the Knox College women. A Tri Delta charter was granted on July 9, 1889. A member of the Simpson College chapter, Hattie Berry, initiated the chapter in August 1889, at the home of one of the charter members, Alta March. A reception was held at the Phi Gamma Delta Hall at Knox College. One of the early initiates of the Knox chapter was Rachel Louise Fitch, known to Tri Deltas as R. Louise Fitch, or more lovingly, “Our Louise Fitch.”
Fitch, a woman well ahead of her time, won honors as a student at Knox, she served Tri Delta in many capacities, including Grand President. She was a career woman, too. My Tri Delta friend, Beth Applebaum, wrote a guest post about her for Women’s History Month 2017.
During World War I, she traveled to Europe and worked for the YWCA in France, collecting stories about the French women and their war efforts, which resulted in the book, Madame France.
She kept her Tri Delta sisters informed about her war work and her letters were published in The Trident. In a letter identified as her last from France, she talks about the first European Tri Delta convention:
I was over in eastern France and had a sudden opportunity to ride with the mail man to the hospital center where Tilley Willey, Alpha Xi, Frances Hammond, Delta Gamma and Ruth Bridge, Delta Beta, are stationed. I grasped this opportunity with both hands and hung on tight until I got there. Ruth was on night duty so I went over to see if Tilley Willey was still at her hospital. I was led to her barrack room and the yip of joy when she saw me was worth a long journey. She was tired and sort of jaded the world temporarily, being encumbered with a lusty cold, and was lying down when I arrived. But there was no more gloom in her vicinity for some time thereafter. Work was light then, as they were evacuating, and her ‘boss’ suggested that she take a day off, which suggestion was eagerly adopted. We had a great visit and I listened with much interest to the story of her work. Her first job after she arrived had been to nurse German prisoners near the front for a couple of weeks. She said she did not mind it much until they kept calling her Kamarad when they wanted something. She stood it for a few times and then told them in firm and decided tones that ‘she was not their kamarad, thank the Lord, and never would be and if they ever called her that again she would do nothing whatever for them. They could call her nurse if they wished, but kamarad, NEVER.’
She and her three friends went on a picnic and ate “real U.S. food such as I had not seen in some months – white-bread sandwiches, stuffed eggs, fried bacon, etc.” She spent the night a Ruth Bridge’s hospital and where Bridge told her about spending ten weeks with an operating unit on the front lines. Fitch wrote, “Ruth’s story of the work of the unit makes you gasp with admiration, both for the work and for the marvelous spirit of our wounded.”
Fitch was elected national president in 1915 and so when she had a chance to meet with her NPC friend, Dr. May Agness Hopkins, national president of Zeta Tau Alpha, in France she took it. They had two weeks in the same place. She said:
We had all kinds of visits and trips together and discussed all phases of sorority life and conditions and had one good time. Dr. Hopkins had a most interesting experience, which I hope will be written up for her own magazine. If no one else sends it in, I think I shall have to, for it is surely corking. She was asked to take a canal boat of wounded down the canal from Chateau-Thierry to Paris – which she did with all kinds of embellishments. It is really great. I will tell you about it when I see you. She is now in Marseilles with the Children’s Bureau of the Red Cross.
