A TRIFLING device of Greek letters in gold and enamel is a potent badge of social distinction in our democratic country, a hallmark of a certain sort of aristocracy.
The college fraternities are aristocratic in that they are self-perpetuating. Their privileges are not to be won through the conquest of adverse conditions and opposing forces; they are handed down by the older generations. Theoretically, admittance depends upon congeniality of spirit; virtually, clanship of race is coming to count more than kinship of soul. The chapters to-day show an increasing proportion of brothers, daughters, cousins, and friends. “If we build a chapter-house, Mrs. Vangoelet will allow her two sisters to come in with us; otherwise not,” expresses this attitude.
The Pan Hellenic Society is an organization of nearly fifty thousand college women, which is spreading enormously. Sixty chapters were established between 1890 and 1900, and two hundred between 1900 and 1910. It has a foothold in seventy-five of our leading coeducational institutions (that is, in all but about three), and several of the large women’s colleges. It is elaborately inspected and regulated by Pan-Hellenics, national and local.
The fraternities are aristocratic in that they are destructive to freedom of intercourse. The fraternal spirit is the great modern separator. It builds first a high wall between the Greeks and the barbarians, and then a maze of social distinctions between fraternity and fraternity. Are there not Attic Greeks and Doric, and Greeks from the far Ionian Isles?
The women’s fraternities began as sororities, and the change of name is significant. It means, they claim, that women as human beings have as much right to be included in the word “fraternity” as in the phrase “the brotherhood of man.” It means more than that. Consciously or unconsciously they have been moved by the aristocratic impulse to attach the early traditions, to create the social atmosphere, of the men’s fraternities; in other words, to lengthen the pedigree of their organization.
Is this unjust? The fraternity women have responded most generously to my inquiries; they have heaped upon me a small mountain of manuscript in explanation and defense of their theories and their practice. How shall I get at the truth? It is almost impossible to say anything that is not true of one fraternity or one chapter and at the same time untrue of others; but I have tried to understand their ideals and to follow up and judge the tendencies of their practice.
With college men the fraternity is frankly a social privilege which may become an invaluable business asset in after life. With women it is theoretically a means of completing individual development: “The university endeavors to graduate a student; the fraternity a significant, unselfish, gracious woman.”
The fraternity idea, however, reaches about one student in ten!
But forget for a time the nine tenths, the heterogeneous mass of the “barbarians,” and look at the system as it develops the elect few; and, to be just, consider it in its ideal form, toward which all the chapters are striving. Here is a group of between fifteen and thirty girls living in a dignified, well-appointed chapter-house near the campus, with a “house mother,” or chaperon. They are good-looking, well-dressed, all-round girls; athletic, dramatic, social-minded, rarely given to overstudy, almost always popular with men. They are not all rich, and not all of patrician family. One is a governor’s daughter, one a milliner’s; one spends all her summers abroad, one earns next year’s fees by teaching in a vacation school; one has always helped with the housework at home, another has never touched a duster or a broom until she takes her turn in polishing the chapter-house floors. If they have one common quality, it is this, as an observant college officer says, that they “do not have to be explained; they are so instantaneously attractive as to make the reason for their selection immediately evident.”