901 The Secret Life of Sororities

The Yale Review of Books (undergrad publication) has an interesting review of Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities by Alexandra Robbins (Hyperion). Robbins is a Bush hater who has distinguished herself with Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power and now looks for more intriguing secrets among our campus Greeks. Review by Rebecca Adler here.

I was never even remotely interested in pledging a sorority when I was in college. As much as I liked my friends in my high school clique, that was enough for me by age 18. I’m thinking Robbins might have thought differently--perhaps was hankering for a Kappa or Chi-O pin, and was rejected. I wore my “independent” status like a badge at the university. Quite to my surprise though, when I got to know them I really liked and admired the sorority women in my classes--they were smart, helpful, hard working, and had lovely personalities. It was the exclusivity I didn’t admire about these clubs. But according to Robbins, that may be the least of the worries, as she chronicles date rape, binge drinking, silly and barbaric hazing routines and mixes in some disturbing statistics. We don’t know if the same thing is going on in the indy dorms and apartments around campus, because that wasn’t her research project, and also, she only followed four women. Not a huge sample when you consider the size of the sisterhood.

In the end, the reviewer turns the magnifying glass on the author and writes: “Robbins falls short of her original open-minded intention, that of examining an unknown culture through a year's immersion. Throughout her account, Robbins maintains a steady downward gaze with an upturned nose, causing Pledged to morph from a sensationalized account of college life into an accusatory diatribe against the power and stupidity of Greek life. After reading through Robbins's ranting, the reader wants to shove her off her privileged soapbox, to suffer humiliation like the pledges she spent so much time with and wasted a whole book destroying.”