The Heritage of Alpha Omicron Pi
Brief History
Alpha Omicron Pi is an international women's fraternity that founded on January 2, 1897 at Barnard College on the campus of Columbia University in New York. Our four tenacious and driven founding sisters were: Stella George Stern Perry, Helen St. Clair Mullan, Jessie Wallace Hughan and Elizabeth Heywood Wyman. With over 180 collegiate chapters, 130 alumni chapters, and more the 130,000 members across the United States and Canada, Alpha Omicron Pi is a member of the National Pan-Hellenic Conference, an organization that oversees 26 women's fraternities and sororities. AOII's national headquarters is located in Brentwood, Tennessee.
The Founding of Alpha Omicron Pi
Barnard College, in the late 1890s, was the first separate college for women to be affiliated with a great men's university such as Columbia University. AOII's four founders were in the class of 1898, young, and unlike most of the women who had entered Barnard in previous years. They were friendly, adventurous, frank and merry, and enthusiastically devoted to each other and to the class of '98.
Determined to make a democratic, unostentatious society, the four women climbed a little winding stair into the stackroom of the old Columbia Library. This little room was rarely used and stored Anglo-Saxon tomes and ancient vellum manuscripts. While the four sat in a dep window seat, pigeons outside and snow lightly falling, they pledged one another at the beginning of the year 1897.
Barnard College welcomed the new fraternity ad it was not long before the first chapter, Alpha, was flourishing. The fraternity became national wit the installation of Pi Chapter at Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, New Orleans, on September 8, 1898.
Over the next 100 years, AOII has added to the ranks 180 collegiate chapters and initiated over 126,000 members. Omicron Chapter (U of Tennessee), chartered on April 14, 1902 as the 4th chapter, is the oldest active chapter today.
AOII has thrived and continued to grow throughout the changing 20th century. Despite several wars, the Great Depression, the women's suffrage movement and the social unrest of the 1960s, AOII has continued to hold true to its ideals. Founder Stella Perry once wrote, "that which makes our bond is promise certain of success. Let us follow our ensign devotedly, utterly and bravely. For our purpose cannot fail."