Gender in Greek Letters: Sororities, the New Woman, and Women's Higher Education, 1870–1930

Since their founding at the turn of the twentieth century, social Greek-letter sororities have initiated almost six million women into their ranks; yet, despite their popularity and influence, very little is understood about how these single-sex women’s organizations structured and reproduced gendered ideals of American womanhood on and beyond the college campus. This poster illustrates the emergence and growth of the Greek-letter sorority at the turn of the twentieth century using a series of maps plotting their expansion between 1870 and 1930. Mapping not only undermines the popular and historiographic conception of sororities as Southern, but illuminates connections to the spread of women’s coeducation. Positioning the sorority as a symbiotic institution to the university, I argue that the sorority was in part a response to late-nineteenth-century critics of women’s education as sororities emphasized both educational achievement and social skills befitting a bachelorette. In effect the sorority functioned as a “finishing school” of “modern” womanhood as founding generations of sorority women inscribed middle-class, Progressive gendered ideals of the “New Woman” into the purpose and function of these organizations.

These organizations merit serious study not only because of their social and political power, but because they provide a lens from which to view shifts in hegemonic white, middle-class American womanhood. To illustrate their utility in tracing gender transmission, I include a visual model and brief description of the methodology I employ in my larger dissertation. Using a collection of scrapbooks, collegiate publications, national sorority magazines, and other sources, I trace how gendered ideals (always in reference to their Progressive Era foundings) were articulated by sorority alumnae, negotiated by sorority collegians, and implemented within the space of the sorority house. The flow of gendered ideas was not unilateral, however, as successive generations of collegians forced the sorority leaders to adjust their recruitment tactics, principally through reinterpretation of their founding myths and values. Although this presentation is limited to the twenty-six historically-white National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) sororities, I suggest that this methodology is equally applicable to the study of the African American sororities of the National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC) or similar single-sex, intergenerational groups like P.E.O. and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Situated at the intersections of women’s and gender studies, the history of education, and the history of childhood and youth, this research challenges historians to consider women’s social organizations’ role in generational transmission of gender ideology and identity.