The Social Scene

Women's Clubs
After this peak during World War Il, though, women's clubs suffered a decline. By the early 1970s the last of the original women's organizations faded away to be replaced by less traditional and more politically oriented women's groups like the Women's Radical Action Project (WRAP) and the Women's Union. These new clubs sought to redefine women's roles at the University and in society at large. In 1985 women received a measure of equality, though not necessarily of the type WRAP had pursued, when the University's first sorority, Alpha Omicron Pi, was formed on campus. Today, it has been joined by Kappa Alpha Theta, and the two sororities play a continuing role in undergraduate activities.

Dances and Socials
Social events have been important embellishments of campus life from the beginning. Clubs, fraternities, athletic teams, and drama and music groups, to name a few, created an atmosphere of constant social activity. For many years, the climax of the social season was the Washington Promenade. "The grandfather of all social events," the Washington Prom began in February 1893 as a parody of scholarly seminars. The 175 professors and graduate students who attended the seminar were treated to some serious but mostly irreverent speeches, highlighted by a paper by Myra Reynolds (PhD 1895), which argued that George Washington was a sun myth.