Nancy Black Wallace was born in New Athens, Ohio, on September 22, 1845. She spent part of her childhood in Pennsylvania where her father was a professor of languages at Westminster College in New Wilmington. When he took a job at Monmouth College, the family moved to Illinois. Becoming a student at Monmouth College must have seemed like a natural thing to do since she had been a faculty member’s daughter and was familiar with the campus. In 1898, as she reflected on those years at Monmouth College, she said, “Self-reliance was not considered in those days an important element in young women’s character and one had to maintain a sort of ‘Sorosis’ air to keep one’s courage up. The new woman spirit was generally discouraged and disparaged. Some of the Founders were more decided upon the question of Woman’s Suffrage then, than even now. Young men winced before argument and paled at the mere mention of such possibilities.” Nancy installed the third chapter of I.C. Sorosis. It was installed in November 1869 at the Mount Pleasant Female Seminary (sometimes called Belden’s Female Seminary) in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. A male Monmouth College student, Thomas H. Macbride, had a cousin, Sarah M. Sterrett, who was attending the school in Mount Pleasant. He asked her if she’d be interested in becoming an I.C. She agreed and found some friends who were also agreeable to becoming members of I.C. Sorosis. Nancy and Prude Kibben (Murphy) of the chapter at Iowa Wesleyan installed the chapter. And in case you are wondering, the seminary was another name for a school and not an institution for religious training as we think of it today. Unfortunately, the chapter was short-lived and its 36 members were put on the rolls of the chapter at Iowa Wesleyan University. Nancy later said. “To be reminiscent by myself, a most uninteresting occupation, especially so when I recall but one piece of real work-that of organizing a chapter at Mount Pleasant, Iowa and I could never forget the royal hospitality, the lining up of a lot of dandy girls, and best of all the inflow of fraternity spirit which welled up in my own soul; to be honest, I think that my chief value as a Pi Phi consisted in an optimistic enthusiasm of following the others to their tasks.” After her marriage to fellow Monmouth College student Robert Wallace, they lived in Sewickley, Pennsylvania; Chicago, Illinois; and Salem, Oregon. She died on September 23, 1918, while on a visit to family in Sewickley. Sources https://piphiblog.org/happy-birthday-nancy/