Alpha Omicron Pi
North American collegiate sorority
Alpha Omicron Pi (ΑΟΠ, AOII, Alpha O) is an international women's fraternity or collegiate sorority. It was founded in 1897 at Barnard College on the campus of Columbia University in Manhattan, New York City. It has more than 140 active collegiate chapters and 159 active alumnae chapters in Canada and the United States. The fraternity is headquartered in Brentwood, Tennessee, and is a member of the National Panhellenic Conference.
History
Alpha Omicron Pi was founded January 2, 1897, at Barnard College on the campus of Columbia University in Manhattan, New York City. Its founders were Jessie Wallace Hughan, Helen St. Clair Mullan, Elizabeth Heywood Wyman, and Stella George Stern Perry. They pledged to one another in the Columbia Law Library to begin their fraternity. Within one week of its founding, the four founders used their initiation ritual for the first time to initiate Anne Richardson Hall.
National expansion began in 1898 with the founding of Pi chapter at Sophie Newcomb College, now part of Tulane University, in New Orleans.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4735091. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1897 and 1898.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alpha Omicron Pi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.