Pledged

by Alexandra Robbins

  This is not to say that these sororities condone lesbian activity at any other time of the year. An Alpha Phi at this school recounted an instance when a sister’s boyfriend said, “I’d like to see you kiss your sister”—and she did. “But then,” the Alpha Phi told me incredulously, “the boy left, and the sisters were still kissing in their room with the door closed! We couldn’t believe it!” Sisters are free to simulate sex by freaking on a dance floor, but nonheterosexual activity outside of Naked Parties sparks shocked looks and snide remarks.

  There is an exception to this contradiction, a time when sorority girls hope to shed their pearls and escape from under the shadow of their letters. This annual tradition—Spring Break—sends them with hordes of other college students to warm climes with lax rules, such as 2003 hot spots Cancun, Acapulco, and Panama City Beach. To study these migratory patterns, I spent several days at another popular 2003 Spring Break destination.

  Negril’s Seven Mile Beach, on the western tip of Jamaica, is a long stretch of powdery white sand bordered on one side by tranquil, aqua waters and on the other by bars, restaurants, and, during my stay, a constant series of Spring Break parties. Theoretically, Spring Break is a time to unwind, a time to relax with sorority sisters away from the pressures of campus life and in a setting whose breathtakingly exotic splendor encourages bonds that transcend pledge class. Theoretically, Spring Break is a calming escape from the hubbub, a time to regroup and collect one’s sorority self in order to return to campus refreshed and composed after a week or so away from the stresses of purchasing partywear and maintaining fraternity relations. But who’s kidding whom? In reality, Spring Break usually degenerates into one long wet T-shirt contest during which sorority sisters onstage (fed volumes of alcohol by a bar or restaurant’s hired party hosts) comply with the request repeatedly chanted in unison by hundreds of fraternity brothers and other college men: “Show us your titties.”

  At Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, dubbed “Spring Break Headquarters 2003,” I intercepted four southern Delta Phi Epsilon girls as they exited the stage of a similar contest. Flushed and breathless in their bikinis, they glanced around furtively to make sure a conservative faction of their chapter wasn’t watching them. “We’re outgoing and they’re dorky,” one DPhiE explained. “They’re wearing their letters, and I was wasted and high as soon as we got on the bus at the airport. By the time we got here I was friends with everybody on the bus. They look down on that.”

  Margaritaville was a frequent highlight on the pink Spring Break calendar distributed to the throngs of student arrivals each week. Nightly parties offered all-you-can-drink specials, a water trampoline, and themes ranging from “Earn Yo Beads Mardi Gras Party” to “The Foam Hook-Up Party” (“Free Bongs for All Party Patrons!!”). Signs at the bar read “Help Save Negril Water. Drink Beer” and “Shirt and Shoes Required. Bra and Panties optional.”

  The DPhiEs took these messages seriously. The night before, one of them, a small, perky girl with large breasts, stripped onstage at Margaritaville and let her sorority sisters paint her nipples and other parts of her body with their hands. “When she took her shirt off, everyone went crazy,” one of her sisters said.

  “I was wasted,” said the petite girl. “The Travel Channel was there. Apparently, I signed the release form.”

  “But legally, contracts don’t count if you’re drunk when you sign them, right?” a sister asked me.

  The small DPhiE shrugged. “Whatever. We leave in two days, and I promised the fraternity guys they’d see my boobs by the end of senior year.”

  After spending time at several campuses at which sorority sisters were easily distinguishable because they constantly wore sorority clothing, I went down to Negril expecting to find sorority girls to interview by spotting their letters. But I remembered once I got to the beach that sorority sisters don’t wear their letters when they drink, and students on Spring Break tend to drink all day. With the exception of a few teetotalers’ T-shirts and one set of blue and pink Delta Gamma flip-flops (the bottoms are engraved with the sorority letters backward so that when the girl steps into the sand, she stamps her letters), I was on my own.

  Gradually, it became easier to pick sisters out and I was able to interview nearly a hundred sorority Spring Breakers. Sorority sisters came to Negril in groups of six, ten, twenty-six, or forty. They walked the beach in small, close-knit packs that strode together, unlike the non-Greek girls, who fanned out on their walks, one or two stopping to pick up a shell or cool her feet in the water. The sorority groups had similar hairstyles, wore makeup to sunbathe, or blow-dried their hair straight before coming to the beach. Also in contrast to their Independent counterparts, the sisters were less likely to wear shorts, sarongs, or towels to self-consciously cover their behinds. They didn’t need to. As a person wary of gross generalizations, it is mind-wrenching for me to write this paragraph. But based on these observations, as I canvassed the beach and the bars asking, “Are you in a sorority?” by the end of my trip I was batting .800.

  “It’s unrealistic here,” an attractive brunette Alpha Chi Omega said as she surveyed the beach outside Margaritaville. She either meant surreal or unreal; I wasn’t sure which. The beach was dotted for miles with students holding rum, Red Stripe, Smirnoff Ice, Corona, or the popular mixed drink “Dirty Banana.” At most of the bars, Spring Breakers could not get into the evening party unless they paid for the all-you-can-drink wristband. This meant that even the students who weren’t planning to drink had to pay between about $20 and $50 just to join their friends; and once they paid, they often decided they might as well drink. Pulsating reggae or dance music throbbed from enormous speakers at intermittent beach bars every hundred feet or so. Jamaicans wove around the sunbathers, offering pineapple or cigarettes, and looking around surreptitiously before whispering, “You want ganga?” or “I got som’ting for you,” or “MARLBORO! MARLBORO! Marijuana. MARLBORO!”

  “A few of us came here to escape the drama bullshit in our house,” the Alpha Chi Omega continued. Her sister sunbathed topless nearby. “We stick together. Even if one of us hooks up with a fraternity guy, the rest of us just wait for her.”

  “Do the rest of you hook up with his fraternity brothers while you’re waiting?” I asked.

  “If the guys want to!”

  The sorority girls were here because they could be anonymous. They were here to break the rules. “We’re here to be wild and crazy because we’re not allowed to be wild and crazy at school,” said a group of midwestern Tri-Delts. “We’re doing the all-inclusive,” remarked a Pi Phi surrounded by six of her sisters. “That means we drink from ten to ten.” An Alpha Sigma Alpha who was with several dozen sisters packed four or more to a room, listed the group’s Spring Break achievements: “One of us won a hardbody contest, two girls came in second in a ‘pimp and ho contest,’ where they had to collect money to do things,” she said. “Every year we all go somewhere. It’s crazy. I wouldn’t go with anyone else.”

  “Why did you come to Negril?” I inquired.

  “We wanted to come back with a tan. That was the big issue.”

  Many sorority Spring Breakers are relieved that with some of their more conservative sisters staying home, they can let loose without fear that news of their behavior will travel back with them to school. Others aren’t so lucky—or careful. While Spring Breaking on South Padre Island in 2003, two Southern Methodist University Tri-Delts agreed to expose their breasts for a Miss Girls Gone Wild pageant, during which contestants were encouraged to kiss each other, eat bananas, and be covered in whipped cream and chocolate syrup. The pageant was broadcast live on pay-per-view television. When Bridgette Wies, eighteen, and Reanae Sath, nineteen, left for South Padre Island, they said their Tri-Delt sisters told them, “Don’t do anything stupid.” After the contest, Wies told a local paper, “I thought I’d regret it. At first I thought I was lowering myself. But I’m really glad I did it.”

  Thanks to the wonders of mass
media, however, by the time the girls returned to Dallas, so had the news of their adventure. When their chapter held a vote to determine whether to disaffiliate them, their sisters voted to keep one girl and drop the other, for popularity reasons. Dissatisfied with the results, the national office and chapter officers had not made a final decision on the girls’ sorority fate by the time of this writing.

  This was the kind of consequence feared by some of the girls I found in Negril. On my last day in Jamaica, I met two Alpha Delta Pis who told me about how they had placed in a wet T-shirt contest and hooked up with several men. “I had sex on the floor of the Jungle dance club with a Jamaican!” exclaimed one, a sophomore.

  “We’ve been making fun of her the whole time,” said the other. “She doesn’t know his name.”

  “If our whole sorority were here, it’d be a big problem,” the sophomore said. “They’d send me to ‘Hearing,’ the group we have to see if we do something against the code of conduct. They can’t fine me for doing what I did, but they could talk with me.”

  “We hope the Jungle doesn’t come back with us,” said her sister, who then repeated what seemed to be the motto of the sorority Spring Breakers on the island: “What happens in Jamaica stays in Jamaica.”

  Sorority Secrets

  SORORITIES’ MOST SACRED TRADITIONS, OF COURSE, HAVE nothing to do with Spring Break. The crux of each organization is its “ritual,” a set of members-only secrets that supposedly bind all chapters of a sorority to the national organization. Ritual, according to Mari Ann Callais, a National Panhellenic Conference–approved expert on the topic, is “a symbolic and often emotional expression of the organization’s myths, values and identity, and, as such, forms the metaphorical bridge between the individual and the organization.” Sorority ritual most often refers to the ceremonies and traditions at initiation and at formal meetings. Sisters swear by oath in front of the sisterhood to keep these customs secret.

  In the last few years, sororities’ national organizations have tried to emphasize a return to the ritual values as a way to try to right a Greek system that seems to have strayed from its founding ideals. In 1999, the national president of Alpha Sigma Alpha wrote in the ASA magazine, “As an organization, we clearly articulate our values through our ritual. Of all the documents, handbooks, policies and procedures, nothing replaces ‘The Ritual of Alpha Sigma Alpha.’ In fact, we could toss all of those other items out an open window and we would never lose our way.” An Alpha Delta Pi document entitled “History Workshop I” explained, “Our Motto, Constitution and Bylaws and Ritual have withstood the test of time . . . The basic components of Alpha Delta Pi Ritual remain unchanged. The ideals remain unchanged.”

  It is generally accepted that Kappa Alpha Theta was the first university Greek-letter fraternity for women, and therefore the first sorority as we know it. In 1870, Bettie Locke, a student at Indiana Asbury University (now known as DePauw), tried to become a full-fledged member of her brother’s fraternity. When the men refused to initiate her and told her that she could wear their badge only if she agreed to be their mascot, she declined. At her father’s suggestion, she instead formed her own women-only fraternity with three friends. Originally, Kappa Alpha Theta served as a support network to the female students, who were treated poorly by male students, faculty, and friends at a school that had only begun to admit women three years before. Sororities were also expected to monitor girls’ behavior. In her 1907 book The Sorority Handbook, Ida Shaw Martin argued that sororities provided a college girl “with family affiliations and with the essential elements of a home—sympathetic interest, wise supervision, disinterested advice . . . There is a danger, and a very grave danger, that four years’ residence in a dormitory will tend to destroy right ideals.”

  Sororities considered it their duty to train their members in etiquette; in return, the women “were reminded not to disgrace themselves, lest they bring shame on their sorority,” according to hazing expert Hank Nuwer. Traces of this purpose still thrived throughout the twentieth century as sororities took it upon themselves to advise their members of proper dress and comportment. A Phi Sigma Sigma who graduated in 1953 remembered the pressure to adhere to certain etiquette commands. She showed me a photograph taken of her sisterhood in which the sisters all wore loafers or saddle shoes, straight calf-length skirts, jewel-neck sweaters (“preferably cashmere”), similar tidy brown hairstyles, and pearls. “The word came down: Wear pearls,” the Phi Sig said.

  The Phi Sig, a Jewish woman, also recalled the exclusive divisions that still exist, either subtly or otherwise. When she rushed, she said, it was known that Jewish girls “were either in a Jewish sorority or none”—not accepted into even the groups that were not founded on Christian values (Chi Omega and Kappa Delta began as Christian-based groups). “There was no crossover. We had to rush all the sororities, but everyone knew which ones you’d really be eligible for. That’s just the way things were.” Several other graduates of the 1950s and 1960s shared stories about their sororities’ blackballing of Jewish rushees.

  By midcentury, despite a spate of state laws prohibiting sororities, fraternities, and secret societies at the high school level as “inimical to the public good,” college sororities were flourishing. In the 1960s, many women viewed sorority sisterhood as a way to meet eligible men. When one woman was invited to become a Sigma Delta Tau in 1962, her parents said she “absolutely had to do it. They felt it was important for social status.” Her experience doesn’t sound all that different from that of sorority girls forty years later. She didn’t like the looks-based snap judgments of the rush process, so she regularly volunteered to work in the kitchen instead. But the sisters wouldn’t let her. “There was a necessary order of those sisters who were acceptable to meet other people in public and those who were shuttled into the kitchen,” she said. “They told me I was ‘not a kitchen person.’” She said that her sorority’s main criteria for rush candidates were fairly shallow: “The big question we asked ourselves during the voting process about rush candidates was ‘Would you want to brush your teeth next to her in the morning?’” Pressure was also intense to date only fraternity boys and to befriend only sorority girls; others were often viewed as outcasts. Hazing was almost as commonplace as it was in later years.

  One major difference between sororities then and now, however, is that when the Sigma Delta Tau was a student, sororities were viewed in many schools as a necessary stepping-stone for women to achieve anything of merit. It was considered a given that women needed sororities to get anywhere. At the Sigma Delta Tau’s midwestern school, where the majority of the student body was Greek, if a woman wasn’t a sister, classmates assumed that it was because she wasn’t good enough—not because she didn’t want to join. But when I sent inquiries to several successful sorority graduates from that era and others, none of them was willing to discuss attributing any part of their accomplishments to sorority membership. Mega-author Sue Grafton, whom the National Panhellenic Conference advertises as a famous sorority woman, put it bluntly: “My sorority membership hasn’t contributed anything to my success.”

  Nonetheless, sorority women from several generations still insist on keeping their sorority rituals secret—even if they can no longer remember what the codes actually mean. Usually gregarious women in their seventies and eighties, far removed from their college days, immediately clammed up when I asked them about their sorority experience. “I can’t say anything about sororities, for reasons I can’t talk about,” one said.

  The first members of sororities developed rituals to reflect the values and standards of their organization. “As sororities developed, a need for structure and continuity emerged,” wrote Mari Ann Callais in a dissertation that does not reveal secrets of her sorority or any others. “As sororities expanded from their founding campus to other colleges and universities, it became important to keep each sorority’s individuality and to establish what made the group special and unique.” This often involves remin
ding sisters of the group’s symbols. The symbols on a sorority’s crest, whether Kappa Delta’s dagger, Chi Omega’s skull and crossbones, or Theta Phi Alpha’s esquire helmet, mean something specific to the members. For example, the crest of the national sororities’ umbrella organization, the National Panhellenic Conference, breaks down this way, according to an NPC document:

  The shield is a protective influence for our entire membership. A lamp denotes leadership, scholarship and enlightenment. The laurel wreath signifies victory, or achievement of ideals. The sword piercing the wreath indicates willingness to fight for ideals, symbolizing, too, penalty of obligation; also bravery, achievement and discipline. The mantling surrounding the shield is the protecting cloak that education gives us, and a protective influence of organization. Thus, there in the mantle is inscribed the name of the National Panhellenic Conference.

  Nationals often remind their sisters to “live the ritual,” meaning that they should reflect on and live by the values of the sorority expressed at its ceremonies. As a speaker at the Greek leadership conference proclaimed to his ballroom audience, “Am I living it better today than yesterday and tomorrow than today? That’s what being Greek is all about. The pursuit of trying to live up to that oath.” In a Kappa Kappa Gamma publication, a sister wrote in 2000, “What is really exciting is that part of your story is shared by every woman of Kappa Kappa Gamma, past and present. Our experiences differ, but despite chapter location, number of members, housing situations, and varied campus life, we do have a shared experience—our Kappa ritual. We all participated in ritual saying the same words, wearing the same clothes and on a higher level, naming the same dreams and the ideals of goodness, truth and beauty and then we endeavored together to seek the finest in life, thought, and character. This is when our Kappa stories became one.”