Plans for Alpha Phi’s first international chapter were in the works at the 1906 Convention. In considering a petition for a charter from a local sorority the Alpha Phi Board invited two of the group’s members, Vera Lyon and Margaret Cole, to attend the Convention in New York City and meet the delegates. The women had formed Psi Delta in December 1902, and their later acquaintance with Edith Sechrist of Delta chapter proved invaluable. Edith assisted them in preparing their petition, and in December 1905, they presented it to the Board. When they returned home after the Convention, they assured their Psi Delta sisters that whether the charter would be granted or not, the “Alpha Phi girls were the kind they admired and wanted to be affiliated with.”
“After several weeks of suspense, word came that our petition had been granted.” Departing from Syracuse on Monday, December 3, 1906, was a happy party of four Alpha chapter sisters: Mabel Lewis Cooper, Marion Diefendorf Condon, Agnes Kent, and newly-retired Quarterly editor, Martha Keefe Phillips. They were en route to Toronto and took with them “an altogether new sense of our importance.” For, they “were conscious that we were going somewhere to do something. You will appreciate our feeling when you know that it was our mission to inaugurate international Alpha Phi.”
After arriving in Toronto—“After our luggage had been inspected—a new experience in the history of Alpha Phi installation functions”— they met the next morning, December 4, 1906, at Margaret Houston’s “pleasant home” on Madison Avenue, joined by Edith Sechrist and the eighteen women who would soon be initiated into Alpha Phi. From ten o’clock until three o’clock in the afternoon, the group was “absorbed in the initiation and formal installation of Xi Chapter,” keenly aware that they were making good on the “founders’ prophecy that one day we should join our forces to those of women in the universities of other countries.” The festivities surrounding such a momentous event included a reception at Queen’s Hall, the women’s dormitory at the university, where faculty members and the dean of women welcomed Alpha Phi members. They also enjoyed a shopping excursion, luncheon at the Teapot Inn, and a banquet. “What [is] more fitting than that within the borders of our nearest neighbor, Canada, we should find our first home outside the States?” Martha Keefe Phillips wrote in the Quarterly. “And now we have eighteen new Alpha Phi sisters [who are] the proud possessors of her badge.”
• In 1915, the world watched in horror as the war on the Western Front and in other theaters proved to be protracted and costly. Alpha Phi was not immune to the events taking place thousands of miles away. The World War had already claimed many victims, and the Fraternity’s only chapter outside the United States, Xi chapter in Canada, belonged to a nation at war. “To Xi,” President Lulu Rued Webster noted in the Quarterly, “Alpha Phi extends her deepest love and sympathy. We hope that the tie that binds us all together, may bring a little comfort with it.” “[N]aturally the war is uppermost in our minds,” Xi’s Edith Grant informed her American sisters, “especially as the lists of casualties have just begun to arrive from the front.” Edith reported the many changes that had come to the chapter since war had been declared. “Patriotic concerts, bazaars, and war lectures,” she wrote, “have been the chief social functions.” The women students busied themselves equipping the University of Toronto’s base hospital, rolling bandages, making compresses and packing surgical supplies, and they bid sad farewells to the male students who left in a steady stream “to fight for their motherland.” Already in the throes of war, Xi chapter reported on its many members who were working for the Red Cross and in a variety of war-related jobs. Xi’s Olive Ziegler had just spent the summer working in a munitions factory. And now, other chapters began to take up their own “war work.”
• “[T]here is a different atmosphere pervading the university,” Xi chapter wrote of postwar life on the campus of the University of Toronto, “an air of vigorous, enthusiastic activity. There are so many returned men back at college resuming their interrupted studies, or starting in as freshmen, that the place is overcrowded, and applicants have been turned away in crowds.”
30 Lowther Avenue, Toronto, Canada
• Mary Macaulay Adams – International Executive Board; Insurance Executive
• Liz Bean Crookston – Foundation Board
• Ashley Haugh – International Executive Board
• Dorothy Stewart Kernohan – International President
• Monica Kennedy Monczka – International Executive Board
• Helen Gardiner Phelan – Noted businesswoman and champion of the arts; received the Order of Canada
• Joan Tamblyn Waddell – International Executive Board
• Jodi White - Canadian philanthropist and political operative who served as Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister under Kim Campbell
• Mary Macaulay Adams - 1972 Distinguished Alpha Phi Award Winner
• Dorothy Page Hilley - 1972 Michaelanean Award Winner
• Margaret MacKenzie Thompson – 1972 Michaelanean Award Winner
• Margaret Gill Smuk – 1992 Michaelanean Award Winner
• Daphne Lewtas Guest – 1994 Michaelanean Award Winner
• Ashley Haugh – 2006 Michaelanean Award Winner, 2014 Constellation Award Winner
• Allison Nash – 2006 Michaelanean Award Winner, 2014 Constellation Award Winner
• Jodi White – 2012 Francis E. Willard Award Winner
• Eleni Makos Bell – 2016 Michaelanean Award Winner
Dec 4th, 1906
$45,828.63