sorority drama, will it ever end?

I should probably warn a few of you that you may be a little upset with me for this post. I apologize. I will start this off then by saying the following: I do not regret joining a sorority, and I enjoyed my time there. I met people that I might never have met otherwise, and it provided an easy way to find a place at the university and allowed me to make friends rather quickly.

That being said, why, tell me, WHY are some people STILL so concerned with sorority life, a full ten years after graduation?

In every city to which I have moved, I have contacted the alumni chapter for my sorority. In this post, I'm not going to specify which one I was (am? I don't know) in, as I don't want this to make the rounds of "let's get rid of this girl!" circles. I have to admit, I have yet to pay my dues of only $40 a year in my post-college life. Sorry. I can't afford it. I'll do it eventually. I just can't swing it right now. I do contribute to causes that they support, so I do feel that I'm giving back, but honestly, I don't have the money to give money toward giving little-sister packages to pledges. I paid my bajillions of dollars toward it in college, and I paid every single fine to which I was assessed for missing meetings or doing whatever wrong, so I don't feel guilty about not having paid my $40. In terms of alumni involvement, I've done what I could. I helped the Boston University and Harvard chapters when I lived in Boston, as their rush chair really wanted a "fresh look" by a more Southern "style" of rush. I told them what we used to do, all that stuff, but unfortunately, a lot of it didn't transfer well - both schools don't allow sorority houses or even dorm floors, they rent rooms to hold ceremonies and keep their "stuff" in a storage space. They appreciated it, though, and I enjoyed talking to the girls in their chapter.

When I moved to Philly, I did get in contact with a few girls through the sorority and actually hang out with them. I even lived with a few of them at the Jersey shore for one summer. Another alum, Ansley (she was at the University of Miami) and I have turned out to be good friends, even after she and her husband moved back to Florida. So yes, I have had some benefits after college because of the sorority.

Other than that and keeping up with a few of my sisters, I really haven't been a model sister. As mentioned, I haven't paid dues. I haven't gone to mock rush. I haven't done jack. Today, I had lunch with a friend of mine who brought another friend of hers who recently moved to Philadelphia from Atlanta. We did the same old dumb thing, played the name game (we had no mutual friends from college years, to our chagrin), and then she got on the subject of sororities. We were not in the same house, or even at the same university, but the question of "so, what WERE you?" came up, in a context that implied I would not have been ANYONE if I hadn't been Greek. The conversation went a little like this. I will call her Elle, because she reminds me a little of Elle Woods from Legally Blonde. Except not charming. Or nice.

Me: "Oh, I was a blankety-blank."
Elle: "Really? Blankety-blanks were some of my best friends, I was in blobbedy-blah."
Me: "That's nice, I believe my grandmother was a blobbedy-blah."
Elle: "You didn't go blobbedy-blah, then? You were a LEGACY!"
Me: "No, I actually didn't pledge til the second part of my freshman year. I only pledged because blankety-blank because I had already met some girls that I really liked and was friends with."
Elle: "oh. Well, blobbedy-blah is really good there, right? Who's the good ones there?"
Me: "I guess, I haven't exactly kept up with which of the 18 sororities are 'good' almost ten years after I've left, though. I mean, they have a really pretty house...but I just kind of felt like that part of the sorority life is what I'm glad to leave behind."
Elle: "what on EARTH do you mean?"
Me: "Well, I didn't like how sororities were so mean to each other. We did it some too, and I certainly made fun of a few of them while I was there. But since then, I just feel like I have a lot better of a character than that. I shouldn't have been so concerned with what I thought of others and what they thought of me."
Elle: "well, we're not like that."
Me: "I have no doubt, I'm not accusing anyone of anything, I just feel like there's a few things I learned there that I learned that I DIDN'T want to embody. I know, the ideals of every organization don't reflect any of how it is, but it's just my experience."
Elle: "would you let your daughter do it?"
Me: "of course, if that's what she wants. I just will make sure that she knows that Greek letters don't make you better than anyone."
Elle: "Oh that's so untrue, sororities aren't like that."

At this point, I shut my mouth instead of saying what I was thinking...yes, there's quite a few sorority and fraternity members who think that their letters make them better than people. I'm not saying ALL of them, but we all remember these people.

Elle: "Well, I'd be sad if my daughter didn't want to be a blobbedy-blah. But I'd be okay if she wanted to go blankety-blank. As long as she didn't go blippity-blip, right?"

I just kind of smiled and nodded at that point, I didn't want to tell her that SHE was the reason I wouldn't necessarily shove my daughter into sororities. I don't want her to turn out like HER. My daughter's list of positive attributes should begin with her good character and good head on her shoulders, not with "she's pretty and is a legacy of blankety-blank". Personally, I'm not proudest of being a member of the sorority as a women's organization. I'm more proud of being a member of NOW, the National Organization for Women, which is, for the record, larger than any sorority, so none are the largest women's organizations as some may claim. While I know that the women who founded my sorority were likely trailblazers of their time, I'm sorry, but Betty Friedan's work formed me WAY more than our charter.

I know that sororities are, in many ways, to their members, a result of the energies their members put into them. I may very well have benefitted from investing more time into it. But honestly, I love that I had - and still do - have friends that weren't in the sorority. I love that my last year, I finally said "I'll just pay the fine" if I just couldn't make it to a fifth or sixth big-sis-little-sis night. I know, I owed more than that to the new members, but honestly, I'd have missed memories that I made instead of attendign those events. When I lived with a shite-load of others in a big old house towards the end of it, Mav Staylor even said to me something that I never forgot:

"Molly, I know you've had fun there, and you'd never quit, but I think it's not in your personality to do something to avoid a fine from your friends. I know you miss stuff when you hang out with us, but people get pissed off at greeks when greeks think that you don't miss stuff with US when you hang out with THEM. It's not like we don't know how to have any fun just because we're not making a t-shirt about it."

Ahh...I miss those rocking chairs and that porch. I do believe that we could write volumes of wisdom from what was said there that summer. He's right. I think that was why I was so peeved by the conversation with Elle today. Things like what she had said (it was a longer conversation than what I just said) seemed to indicate that she honestly thought that there was no way someone could have had fun without having had the right greek-letter sweatshirt in their closet.

I know that things are, for lack of a better word, just DIFFERENT in the South. I think it's part of what makes greeks such a curious little institution, to borrow a phrase from history. But honestly, I don't think that exclusion and looking down upon people should - or was intended to - be a part of these organizations. I actually think it's WHY I chose the one that I ended up being a part of - because the others on campus seemed to relish who they WOULDN'T let in rather than celebrate the differences among their members. While I was at UGA, one sorority got in a National amount of trouble when a member quit her sorority because many in her organization had questioned the motivations of a particular black woman who was going through an otherwise all-white Rush. I don't know what my nineteen-year-old self would have done, but I hope I would have done the exact same thing as that member did. I'd frankly be disappointed in my daughter if I found out that she DIDN'T stand up for what was right in that situation.

Who knows, though. I AM glad to have met every single person (okay, minus a couple, who will remain nameless) that I met in my sorority. I learned a lot about myself and how women are stronger in numbers. And if I find $40 laying around, I'll send it off to the Executive Offices.