A Fraternity of Firsts

In 1892, a way of life came to an end for the men of Tufts. That summer, the small Universalist college, an all-male sanctuary since its founding in 1852, surrendered to the modern coeducational movement that had taken hold at other eastern institutions such as Colby and Wesleyan. President Elmer Hewitt Capen admonished the trustees of the college that it was “their duty to admit women, in order to keep up with the demands of the time.” The trustees, after years of saying “no,” finally relented.

Ten brave women enrolled alongside the men that fall, and the men didn’t like it a bit. One student lamented to the Boston Globe, “I would rather not see the girls on the hill. It doesn’t look natural, and we don’t feel natural in the classroom with them, either.” A second bemoaned, “Now we must be on our strictest and most conventional behavior for fear of shocking the girls.” A third carefully explained, “We shall not be able to go and come as we please, and we will be bound with a perfect network of restrictions never imposed upon us till the women’s appearance on the scene.” A fourth worried that “couples would go off spooning by themselves,” thereby destroying the sacred bonds of friendship between male classmates.

Despite getting the cold shoulder, the women were determined to make the most of their educational opportunity. They hailed mostly from nearby Medford, Somerville, Chelsea, and Methuen, although three were from Chicago, New York City, and Portland, Maine. As for why they enrolled, one woman said, “I came because it is near my home…. I [also] prefer the advantage one gets in studying in common with men. It … has the effect of broadening women’s minds.” Another remarked, “I came to Tufts … because it is a Universalist college,” a common reason at the time among male students as well.

But the women knew they were not walking into the same experience as the men. Administrators warned them that the college had nothing to offer outside the classroom—the three months between the vote for coeducation and the start of the school year had not been enough time to build anything for the women. They would have to commute from home, or board in private, off-campus houses, and there were no clubs they could join, no female dining halls, no athletic teams, no nothing. Well, not quite. There was a small anteroom in the library (now Packard Hall) set aside for their use as a lounge, a humble gesture by the trustees while they worked to build a women’s dormitory. For the three women who enrolled in Tufts’ Crane Theological School, however, there was something else. One organization in that school, the Hebrew-letter fraternity Heth Aleph Res, welcomed them with open arms.

Started by eight men just a year earlier, Heth Aleph Res was similar in structure to the four active Greek-letter organizations on campus at the time—Zeta Psi, Theta Delta Chi, Delta Upsilon, and Delta Tau Delta—with regular chapter meetings, secret rituals, and social activities to promote fellowship. As to the fraternity’s name, the founders likely chose Hebrew letters instead of Greek to reflect their chosen course of study. The secret or symbolic meaning behind the name (there undoubtedly was one) has been lost to history.

These fraternal ministers-in-training were a motley bunch. Among the founders were Carl Henry, a farm boy from Ohio who had recently graduated from Buchtel College in his home state; George Leighton, a nineteen-year-old from Dexter, Maine, with no prior experience in higher education; and James Tillinghast, a practicing lawyer from Buffalo, New York, who had heard the call to ministry at age twenty-five. Yet all were committed to Universalism, a faith known then (as Unitarian Universalism is today) for its progressive attitude toward women. It seems that by inviting their female classmates into their fraternity, the men had decided to practice what they would soon be preaching. Two of the three women, Angie Brooks of Portland, Maine, and Mabel MacCoy, a thirty-six-year-old former faith healer and soon-to-be divorcee from New York City, accepted the invitation and were initiated as full members a few weeks into the semester. Heth Aleph Res was now a coed organization, the first ever at Tufts.

Surprisingly, the rest of the campus greeted this development with praise. Perhaps the passage of those first few weeks showed the men of Tufts that coeducation would not cause the sky to fall. Or perhaps the liberal arts undergraduates felt their divinity school peers should be allowed to do as they pleased. Either way, the editors of the campus magazine, The Tuftonian, were soon heaping affection onto Heth Aleph Res. “We regard this move on the part of the Hebrew letter society with favor,” they wrote, “and predict that the ladies will provide a source of social, moral, and intellectual strength to the fraternity.” The other fraternities, meanwhile, made no effort to admit women into their own ranks.

Soon Heth Aleph Res was breaking new ground in another area. The members decided to stop operating out of day rooms in Medford or Davis Square, which was the modus operandi for Tufts fraternities at the time, and instead occupy a place never before seen at the college: a fraternity house. In late November 1892, Heth Aleph Res established a chapter house at 31 George Street, just a block north of campus. The two women in the fraternity, Angie Brooks and Mabel MacCoy, rented rooms there, and every day at mealtime, they broke bread with their brothers in the dining room under a shared boarding plan. The benefits Heth Aleph Res now enjoyed, such as daily interaction among members, enhanced camaraderie, a place to perform ritual ceremonies, and a space the members could truly call home, were manifest, and within two years, three of the four Greek-letter fraternities at Tufts had also abandoned their off-campus day rooms for on-campus houses.

Not everyone viewed Heth Aleph Res as a model organization, though. Victorian morals governing interactions between the sexes were still very much in force, and over the summer of 1893, the trustees of Tufts College resolved that “the maintenance of clubs for the purpose of providing board or lodging for men and women will not be permitted under any circumstances.” But Heth Aleph ignored the edict, reopened its coed chapter house in the fall, and incurred no wrath from the administration. In fact, they took a big step forward the next summer, constructing a large new chapter house at 37 Sawyer Avenue, just down the street from Delta Upsilon’s new home. As a result, Sawyer Avenue became the first “fraternity row” at Tufts, beating out Professors Row by decades.

The new space allowed Heth Aleph Res to solidify its presence on campus. They hosted banquets each semester to honor members and alumni. They sponsored open lectures by religious students and leaders alike on topics such as “John the Baptist, the Greatest Man in History” and “The Mistakes of Moses.” They threw card parties, whist being the game of choice, and hosted interfraternity receptions. Not that they ever rolled out barrels of beer—nearly all in Heth Aleph Res were ardent supporters of the temperance movement. Mabel MacCoy expressed the views of many in her fraternity with her speech “Moderate Drinking—A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.”

In spring 1895, Heth Aleph Res pushed the envelope again. A married couple, James and Anna Tillinghast, both students in the divinity school, took up residence in the house, while the Reverend Harry Canfield, a divinity school alumnus, moved in for a few months with his wife and their newborn son, Hubert. This is probably one of the few cases, if indeed the only one, where a child has lived in a Tufts fraternity house.

Then, just a year later, the living situation at Heth Aleph Res turned downright scandalous. Starting in the fall of 1896, and for the next three years, a group of men and at least four unmarried women—Tacy Mathew, Lucy Milton, Fannie Austin, and Frances Kimball—lived alongside one another in the house, marking the first instance of cohabitation on the Tufts campus. It is hard to fathom today how radical this arrangement must have been back then, given the conservative morals in play. And yet there is no evidence that anyone in the Tufts administration did anything to change the situation or punish the offenders. Perhaps they were more concerned with larger problems, such as the economic depression of 1896.

Heth Aleph Res kept going strong until the eve of the twentieth century, when the golden age of Universalism in the Northeast began to fade and enrollment in the Crane Theological School plummeted. Dwindling membership forced the fraternity to give up its chapter house in the fall of 1899, and by 1904, Heth Aleph Res appears to have dissolved completely. The divinity school, meanwhile, lasted until 1968, one year shy of its one-hundredth anniversary.

In its scant thirteen or so years on campus, Heth Aleph Res helped prepare dozens for ministries that reached all corners of the country, and the women, like the men, touched thousands of lives. For example, in 1895 Mabel MacCoy became the first woman ordained as a Universalist minister in Massachusetts when she took over as pastor of First Universalist Church in Mansfield. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, she left the pulpit to advocate for social causes that ranged from the generally accepted temperance movement, to the highly controversial teaching of sex education in public schools, to the radical belief that many of society’s ills could be cured through the pseudoscience of eugenics and its mantra of selective breeding. Anna Tillinghast became a district commissioner in the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Immigration, the first woman ever to hold such a high post. In this position she helped deport Charles Ponzi, the famous cheater whose scheme, unfortunately, remains popular today.

Nor can the legacy of Heth Aleph Res at Tufts itself be denied. The members’ acceptance of women undoubtedly helped ease tensions in the early 1890s, when the college was adjusting to coeducation. Also, by ushering in the concept of a chapter house and shared boarding plan, the fraternity shaped campus life for years to come. And finally, the idea that fraternity membership could be open to both men and women, though it remained dormant for another seven decades, did eventually return to Tufts in 1974. That fall, the few former members of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, who had lost their national charter, invited women into their house as equal partners. The group soon became the coed fraternity known as ATO of Massachusetts—an organization still active on campus today.

Charlie Trantanella is a member of the Sigma Nu fraternity. He is working on a book titled Brown and Blue and Greek: A History of Fraternities, Sororities, and Early Student Organizations at Tufts University.