Monmouth College: Where the Sororities Were Born

Monmouth College was founded on April eighteenth, eighteen fifty-three, by the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church in the frontier town of Monmouth in western Illinois. From its first year the college admitted women and Black students, at a time when most American colleges did neither. The founding charter's inclusion was not incidental. The Presbyterians who started Monmouth were from the abolitionist tradition, and equal access was a deliberate statement of principle.

The town itself had a notable piece of American history already attached to it. Wyatt Earp was born in Monmouth on March nineteenth, eighteen forty-eight, five years before the college opened, in a house on South Third Street that still stands.

At Monmouth College in eighteen sixty-seven, a group of twelve women founded Pi Beta Phi, the first national collegiate women's fraternity organized as such, with a national charter structure, dues, and rituals designed to work across campuses. Three years later, in eighteen seventy, six women at Monmouth founded Kappa Kappa Gamma. Two of the largest women's Greek-letter organizations in American higher education were both born at the same small prairie college, in consecutive years, in the same decade the college opened.

The reason both organizations took root here is connected to Monmouth's founding character. The college admitted women, which was still unusual enough that women who attended felt the need to organize their own social and intellectual life the way men had been doing for decades at institutions that had always admitted them. The Greek-letter model gave them a structure that could travel beyond any single campus.

Monmouth College remains a small liberal arts college today, with an enrollment of around eight hundred students, its brick buildings still arranged around the same central campus the founders laid out in the eighteen fifties on the Illinois prairie.