The beginnings of Zeta Tau Alpha...
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"It is the object of this fraternity to cultivate a higher ideal of womanhood and to
encourage all those womanly traits existent in our kind, to give a firmer foundation
to those friendships founded on college companionship, to promote sympathy in
both sorrows and pleasures, to furnish aid and sisterly advice in our school life."
                                                                                        -Maud Jones

Zeta Tau Alpha is known as a fraternity, not a sorority. By definition, a fraternity is an organization whose members have banded together for reasons of common interest and mutual benefit.  There is usually an element of secrecy in its design.  It was the intent of the founders of Zeta Tau Alpha and confirmed at two early conventions that Zeta Tau Alpha be designed as a "fraternity."  This was done to distinguish ZTA from the sisterhoods organized in connection with men's fraternities, called "sororities."  Zeta Tau Alpha has no "brother" fraternity.

Zeta Tau Alpha was organized on October 15, 1898 at the Virginia State Female Normal School
which later became Longwood College in Farmville, Virginia. The nine founders of this fraternity are:
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Maud Jones (Zeta Tau Alpha's first president), Alice Bland Coleman, Ethel Coleman, Ruby Leigh, Frances Yancey Smith, Della Lewis, Helen Crafford, Alice Grey Walsh, and Mary Jones. The first three pledges were Odelle Warren, Ellen Baxter Armstrong, and Grace Elcan. All twelve members are pictured in the photograph above.  In 1898, the average age of the ZTA founders was 15.  Ruby Leigh outlived all the other Founders and lived to the age of 104!