Pledged

by Alexandra Robbins

  “I don’t know about this sorority thing,” Andrea whispered, rattled by her sisters’ phony tinkling laughter and the judgmental way they eyed each other’s outfits.

  “I was really skeptical after I was initiated, too,” Sabrina told her. “I know you’re intimidated by the older sisters, but you shouldn’t be. Since there are so many girls in the house, it’s going to be hard to fit in the moment you walk through the door.”

  “But what if I have to miss a bunch of meetings?” Andrea asked.

  “Don’t sweat it. You have to keep your priorities straight. A sorority is a good experience, but you don’t have to let it take over your life,” Sabrina said. “Over time, you’ll be more confident about being in the sorority. I am.”

  After that conversation, Sabrina felt more connected to Andrea. Simply having another confidante gave Sabrina herself greater strength in the house—not enough to confront the more ignorant sisters, but enough to make her sense that she remained in Alpha Rho for reasons other than a living space. This year had taught Sabrina both that she could survive in a sorority without taking it very seriously and that she was not in Alpha Rho for all 160 girls. She remained a sister because of the ten or so girls who meant something to her and reminded her that though the real world, like many of her sisters, may not be kind, she would always have allies to help her succeed.

  Sisterhood without the Sorority

  BY THE END OF THE YEAR, SABRINA’S FEELINGS ABOUT sorority life hadn’t changed much. She didn’t believe that the concept of a sisterhood squared with reality. “Sisterhood is a form of structure, drama, and friendship. It has given me some structure in my life, with regular meetings and events that help me plan my schedule. It’s an organization that I met my best friend through,” she said. “But it’s also a thing where you have a lot of people ‘there’ for you only superficially. That really hits home for my situation. I don’t think people really care about each other wholeheartedly or make an effort to be ‘sisters.’ I’ve noticed that many people in this house are so selfish. For them, being friends with another person depends on how that person can fit into their lives or benefit them.”

  For Sabrina, the value of belonging to a sorority wasn’t in the sisterhood. She was grateful that Alpha Rho had introduced her to Caitlin and Andrea. But after a year of living in the sorority house, she had to grasp to find a reason that made her time in Alpha Rho seem worthwhile. “I feel ambiguous about it. It’s an elitist institution. I know that I would have had an awesome college experience had I not joined. I’ve had a lot of negative experiences in Alpha Rho and in that sense it sucks sometimes, but it’s teaching me more patience. At least it’s a way for me to learn about people,” she said. We talked about the ways some of the sisters had treated her and about how the extensive sorority commitments took both time away from her studies and money from the funds she used to pay for her education by herself. “The way I see it, [these negatives are] just a part of life. I feel like from now on, I’m always going to have to juggle commitments and somehow you have to make them work out. So this is practice, I guess,” she said. “Maybe once I’m in the real world I’ll have an easier time being independent than my sisters.”

  Ultimately, sorority membership held little more for Sabrina than a learning experience. This was the only way that she could justify loyalty to an organization in which some sisters mocked her culture (with racist remarks), treated her meanly (by eating her birthday chocolates and rummaging through her things), and talked down to her (“go down there right now”). It was the only way that Sabrina could rationalize remaining in an environment in which she did not feel comfortable enough to stand up for herself. “If I don’t look at Alpha Rho with a positive spin on the negative things, then I’d just be miserable,” she said.

  Caitlin, whom I talked to separately about sisterhood, felt that life in a sorority held similar lessons for her. “Alpha Rho taught me some stuff, like some people never change. There’s always going to be that group of girls who think they’re better than you—not just in high school—and they don’t always grow out of it. Some people don’t understand there’s no point in being mean. I wonder what kind of people Fiona and Whitney will grow up to be,” she said.

  By the end of the year, however, the sorority had become a bigger part of Caitlin’s life than Sabrina’s. The strength, independence, and confidence that Caitlin sensed she had gained between August and April she attributed in part to her leadership role as Alpha Rho’s vice president. “My mother was wrong about sororities. Greek life in general has been supportive for me, something to motivate myself, to be involved in, to care about. It’s been a grounding,” she said.

  When I asked Caitlin what sisterhood meant to her she said nothing about her sisters as a support network or a collective unit. Instead, she talked about Sabrina. “I’m not best friends with anyone in the house except Sabrina. I couldn’t just call up anybody and say, ‘Wanna hang out tonight?’ But Sabrina and I became a lot closer. We’ve never had girl best friends before and it’s weird. Now we actually tell each other about stuff that happens when usually we would just keep it in,” Caitlin said. “I think of sisterhood as a one-on-one bond. It’s a strong bond you share with another female, and a building on that bond based on common experiences. We might be sisters but not have a strong sisterhood unless we go out and do things like retreats, where we really get to know each other. I’m looking forward to next year in Alpha Rho.”

  While Sabrina managed to stay ambivalent about sorority life and Caitlin was appreciative of it but took the Greek system with a grain of salt, Vicki’s attitude toward her sisters changed dramatically through the year. I was particularly curious about whether Vicki believed the speech that she gave rushees in January. “I guess I exaggerated a little bit, but I think basically it’s true. It was a good decision that I did this. It opened up a new world where I’ve met so many people I wouldn’t otherwise have met,” she said. “I never used to want to come back to my room. Now I get sad when nobody’s here. It took a semester to warm up to it, but now this feels like my house and I’m ten thousand times more comfortable. I’m sad to be leaving for the summer. I have a much bigger social thing going on over here than at home. I drink more, smoke more, I’m more into trying new things, meeting new people . . . My friends at home”— she paused, perhaps realizing the dramatic change in her attitude since her first days in the Beta Pi house—“aren’t cool anymore.”

  As an observer, it was evident to me that Vicki had gone from being a wallflower who watched the sisterhood from its fringes to one of the “popular girls” around whom the sisterhood revolved. I asked her what had changed besides her room situation that had so radically altered her attitude toward Beta Pi. She said that the older girls who moved out of the house after first semester were the sisters she didn’t know well. The girls who remained, by contrast, were people she wasn’t afraid of. During second semester, Vicki was a constant fixture in the television room she had shied away from before. “There are only so many of us who go downstairs and talk in the television room. I didn’t do it last semester. But I finally realized that if I wanted to be friends with these girls I would have to hang out in the television room and make the effort. Now I talk to anyone who’s sitting down there and that’s how the friendships are made, you know?” she said, laughing self-consciously to signify she recognized the triteness of her words.

  The factor that most turned Vicki’s experience around was that she found a close circle of friends who cared about her—Olivia, Ashleigh, and even Morgan insulated her within the sisterhood. “I definitely feel so much better now that I have a group,” Vicki told me at the end of the year. She was careful, however, to add a caveat: it was friends, not sisterhood, that improved her year. “I have my friends but I still think the concept of a sorority is weird. It could be seen as we’re all friends because we’re in the same sorority, but there are definitely girls here who I’m not friends with,” she said. Vicki viewed
the sorority as a series of inconveniences that were necessary to tolerate so she could live with and get to know the girls who became her close friends. Many times throughout the year, she said, Beta Pi’s rules, rituals, activities, and commitments left her thinking, “This is so stupid. Why do I have to do this?” By the end of the year, although her attitude toward some of her sisters had changed, she still would not volunteer to non-Greeks that she was a sorority sister—and in public she never wore her letters.

  Vicki separated the “concept of a sorority” from the friendships she had made within it. Watching her distinguish between friends and sisters caused me to wonder whether it was possible to have an organization that separates sisterhood from what the girls characterize as the frequently silly trappings of sorority life. For these girls, the ideal organization would have Amy’s common bond, Sabrina’s structure, Caitlin’s home base, and Vicki’s friendships—but without sororities’ pressure to conform, focus on fraternity dates, overwhelming number of obligations, emphasis on alcohol, imposed rules and values, superficial recruitment system, disdain or reluctance toward true diversity, and hierarchical environment conducive to hazing. Was it possible to find sisterhood outside of a sorority?

  With this question in mind, I attended a Subrosa meeting at the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, Subrosa is a women’s community service organization that is unaffiliated with any national group (some other schools also have local Subrosa chapters). Like sororities, Subrosa has initiation, Formals, Big and Little Sisters, mixers, regular meetings, and sisterhood bonding activities such as Bowling Night and Screw Your Sister. Unlike sororities, Subrosa has no dress code, rule book, fines, or mandatory events, and most of its activities involve community service.

  Because Subrosa does not have a house on campus, its forty-five sisters meet weekly in a private lounge in one of the on-campus high-rise apartment buildings. Like most of Subrosa’s meetings, this one was run informally, with sisters leaning on couches or sitting cross-legged on the floor. The sisters varied in looks, race, clothing, and hairstyle. As the meeting began, a co-social chair distributed tickets to the following week’s Formal; 100 percent of the sisters had signed up to attend the end-of-the-year activity. As it did every semester, Subrosa rented out a bar/restaurant with money raised from the girls’ seventy-dollar-per-semester dues. Subrosa, which doesn’t believe in hierarchies, refers to its leaders not as presidents but as calyxes, “the part that holds a flower together.” In a soft, unassuming tone, the co-calyx explained that after addressing this week’s business the girls would assemble “care baskets” and cards to deliver to women at a nearby hospital.

  After discussing the group’s web site, “senior send-off” social event, bake sale, and “Hunger Walk,” the sisters caught up on each other’s lives as they assembled items such as mugs, scented candles, and pastel photo albums into the care baskets. I took the opportunity to talk to some of them about the strength of the Subrosa sisterhood. “In many ways our sisterhood is stronger than a sorority because we’re not forced to be with each other or live with each other,” said one of the co-calyxes. “It’s more by choice that people want to be a part of this, so our bond is stronger.”

  I sat next to Darcy and Jessica, two of several Subrosa sisters who joined the group after giving up sorority life. The former Phi Sigma Sigmas told me that their Penn Phi Sigma Sigma chapter did community service activities only once a semester. If a sister didn’t want to participate, she could buy her way out of the requirement for ten dollars. “We had to force girls to come to events at Phi Sig. Here, everyone wants to come,” Jessica marveled. “Everything here is more optional than sorority activities and Subrosa gets better attendance.”

  “This is better for me. I’m kind of bitter about sororities. I’d kill myself before I’d go through that again,” Darcy added.

  Jessica and Darcy joined Subrosa after their Phi Sigma Sigma chapter was shut down in the fall. They said that Phi Sigma Sigma’s national office informed the sisters at a meeting at Penn in October 2002 that because several girls had deactivated in the spring, the chapter wasn’t at full capacity. Informal rush had already ended, but Nationals gave the sisters just three weeks to find new members, give them bids, initiate them, and get them to pay dues. In 2002, the Phi Sig chapter had the highest sorority GPA at Penn and a Phi Sig sister was voted the campus’s “Outstanding Greek Leader.” The chapter was one of the few sororities on campus that hadn’t broken rules in recent memory; meanwhile, at the time the girls told me their story, three other sororities at Penn were under investigation for alcohol violations. But Phi Sig Nationals, the sisters said, “didn’t care unless you gave them the seven hundred dollars.” If the chapter didn’t make quota, Nationals would shut it down.

  When Nationals told the sisters of their plan to “re-colonize”—or reestablish the Penn Phi Sig chapter with new women—in 2004, the girls balked. The sisters didn’t even try to recruit new members. Instead, when Nationals gave the sisters the option to deactivate from the sorority or take on alumna status (thus maintaining their Phi Sigma Sigma affiliation), nearly all of the seventy-five sisters resigned. In a campus press release, the Phi Sigma Sigma Penn chapter president stated, “the bureaucracy of Phi Sigma Sigma has caused the organization to forget what sororities and Greek life are created to promote, and the former sisters no longer want to be associated with such an organization.”

  Meanwhile, since they gave up their letters, the sisters haven’t made an effort to keep in touch. “When everything fell apart, the older girls didn’t come ask about us at all,” Jessica said. “But Nationals keeps sending us e-mails asking for money.” When I asked Darcy and Jessica if anything symbolic or meaningful from the sorority had stayed with them despite the demise of a sisterhood that became so easily fractured, they laughed. The one thing they could remember was that in keeping with their national ritual, the Penn Phi Sigs, like all Phi Sigs, ended every meeting with the words, “Once a Phi Sigma Sigma, Always a Phi Sigma Sigma.”

  The “Special Bond of Sisterhood”

  My daughter will make friends in her residence hall and classes. What would be different about sorority friends?

  —A question in the 2001 National Panhellenic Conference publication

  Women’s Fraternity Membership: A Perspective for Parents

  A special bond of sisterhood is developed among chapter members—a bond that extends to all who share the same heritage, traditions and ritual and who wear the same sorority badge. These friendships last beyond the college years and are nurtured by alumnae activities and networking programs that provide opportunities for continued camaraderie, service, and personal development.

  —Answer, from the same publication

  WITH THE EXCEPTION OF A FEW CHAPTER ADVISERS, MOST of the graduates I spoke with had distanced themselves from their sorority after college—or after sophomore year. They rarely attended alumnae activities, if at all, and knew of few networking programs available. They did not think of sororities as a source of “continued camaraderie, service, and personal development.” Several women did keep up with a few of their closest friends from their sorority and told me that those friends were the best things to come out of their sorority experience. Others continued old rivalries. Some of the Delta Zetas, for example, managed to get revenge on one of their “mean girls” a few years after graduation. A girl who had played a role in bullying Mary out of the chapter had job interviews set up at a well-known marketing company in New York City. Her first interview was with a woman in the human resources department who turned out to be one of her sorority sisters. The minute the bully left the room, the sister ripped up her résumé, laughing as she said to herself, “You should have been nicer in college.”

  Just as Penn’s Phi Sigma Sigma illustrated that institutionalizing friendships couldn’t keep a sisterhood from cracking, Brooke discovered after graduation that an affiliation is not the same thing as a support system. After college, the Ten settled in
the same suburban area. Beginning with the week after graduation, they each got married on successive weekends, with the other nine as their bridesmaids. They now attend the same church and country club together and still try to discourage Eta Gammas from keeping in touch with women from other sororities. Three years after graduation, they still e-mail each other about how they cannot believe that Brooke continues to date Johnny, her Mu Zeta Nu boyfriend.

  The Eta Gamma label clearly helped Brooke in her first year out of college. Sorority networks are especially powerful in the South—and can get a sister far in Texas. As the interviewer at one of the most prestigious entertainment agencies in the country looked down Brooke’s résumé, she stopped and gasped. “You’re an Eta Gamma?” she asked. “So was I! You’ve got the job.” Brooke also believed that the experience of learning how to get along with difficult women prepared her well for her position in a company known for its corporate backstabbing. “I don’t know if I’d do the sorority all over again if it meant being with my pledge class,” Brooke said. “But it made me so ready for this company because otherwise I’d never have been with so many bitchy girls in one setting before. This is a walk in the park compared to Eta Gamma.” Once the Ten found out she was working for some of the industry’s most famous names, they suddenly began to call her. Finally, in their eyes, Brooke was worthy.

  But that didn’t mean she was a friend. Nine months after graduation, Brooke was driving home from work on a highway when her convertible was broadsided by a truck. When she regained consciousness after several hours of surgery, she learned she had broken her neck and hip, fractured her femur, and sustained other injuries that would leave her in the hospital for weeks. One of the most difficult things Brooke had to do in her life was to talk to her parents after the accident without letting on that she was terrified. Sobbing, her mother told her she wanted to fly to Texas and take care of her long-term, but Brooke thought that with Johnny and her large number of friends in the area she would be able to take on her additional surgeries and massive rehabilitation with strength, grace, and gumption. And she did—but not with as wide a support network as she had expected. When word spread quickly through the Eta Gamma grapevine about Brooke’s accident, she received care packages and regular visits and calls from four of her sorority sisters. A few other sisters e-mailed short notes. But the rest of the sisterhood, including the Ten, were silent. “It was very strange. They all knew about it,” Brooke said. “It made me realize who my friends were and weren’t, and it clarified what’s important and what’s really not.” Over the next year, as Brooke struggled to walk again, only the four sisters offered help and compassion. “The other girls, it just wasn’t in their makeup. They’re really out for themselves. They might have been supportive if this had happened in college, but now that we’re out of the group, it’s just not how they work,” Brooke said.