FAMILIES My Kappa, My Self

There i was, in my __, sur-rounded by , holding a and ing all those . It just wasn’t me, somehow, although when time came to , well, everything came back, just as though it were yesterday.

Forgive my vagueness. My blanks, I mean-but the whole ceremony is secret, and although I eventually broke just about all my marriage vows in one way or the other, as well as a handful of the Ten Commandments, I’ve never, never broken my sorority vows. Never, My lips are sealed and mum’s the word. In fact, several years ago, a non-sorority friend shocked my socks off by demonstrating the Theta grip, which her mother had taught her. “Oh, come on,’* my friend said when I expressed disapproval. “You make fun of sororities all the time.”

Maybe so, I said; nevertheless a Kappa would never, never show a non-Kappa the Kappa handshake. It just isn’t done.

“Not even to her own daughter?”

Not even to her own daughter.

Of course, now that my daughter has joined me in sisterhood, I suppose we can give each other the Kappa handshake and whisper the . We aren’t merely mother and daughter; we’re sisters, right?

“Can you believe our girls joining sororities? This is hard for an old Sixties rebel like me to take,” the mother of my daughter’s roommate wrote me last summer. “One thing for certain. 1 refuse to attend any mother-daughter teas. There, I draw the line.”

I wrote her back saying, absolutely, and what did she think: would a silk suit be appropriate or should I buy something a little more California-casual? We both knew if our daughters wanted us to attend a tea, we’d by God be there. I even admitted that I’d been in a sorority and loved it. Shy, somewhat insecure, I enjoyed the entrée to friendship, but that was back in the late Fifties at hometown TCU. I was so naive, so unworldly I didn’t even suspect that I was naive and unworldly. My daughter, though, isn’t like me, nor are the times the same. I’m not anti-sorority. I just feel that the strong don’t need a crutch, and my daughter’s one tough cookie. Looking back at college, what I see is Sorority, so big it looms over the view and almost obliterates the rest of the scene. That’s wrong, and I feel that by committing to a sorority, I lost out on what college should be: a kaleidoscope of experiences.

Before settling on UCLA, my daughter and I had searched two years for the right college, studying catalogues and college-ranking books, figuring and refiguritig finances, visiting the three or four lop contenders. During our college search, my daughter and I considered theater departments (her major), costs, academic reputations, campus facilities, maybe even climate and boy-girl ratios, but not once did we consider sororities; nor, as far as I know, did her close friends.

Anyway, my daughter decided not to go through rush her freshman year at UCLA, promising her grandmother-yep, another Kappa-that she’d keep an open mind, but I didn’t want her to rush and I told her so.

In my circles, one doesn’t mention being a sorority member. It’s like saying you were a pompon girl in high school. (Okay, I was that, too.) Neither is anything to be ashamed of or embarrassed by, but both seem to belong to another world.

But then a friend scolded me: “You traveled three blocks to a small college, where you already knew half the student body. It’s easy for you to tell Maurie she doesn’t need a sorority, while she’s going across the country to an enormous school in an enormous city where she doesn’t know a single person.”

Head hanging, I backed off, and sure enough, in the spring of her freshman year, Maurie said she might rush as a sophomore. She missed the core of female friends she’d had in high school, and she wanted to expand her acquaintances beyond the fine arts department. “I probably won’t pledge,” she said. “But I want to meet more people. I think it will be an interesting experience.” Meanwhile, I looked at the idea with a more practical eye, too. UCLA has a housing shortage, and almost all upperclassmen find private housing, which doesn’t come cheap (even with six students to an apartment) in the adjacent neighborhoods of Bel Air, Brent-wood, and Beverly Hills. Sorority members reside for relatively reasonable rates at houses across the street from campus.

I still wasn’t convinced, but then, once Maurie had made up her mind, I really became weird, rolling from total negativism to studied indifference to “Well, if you’re really going through with this, you might as well pledge Kappa. It would mean a lot to your grandmother.” Finally, I could hardly wait till she could to the and put the on the right along with me. I helped her organize her rush clothes, following the guidelines: Day 1: shorts, sandals or tennies; Day 2: shorts, sandals or tennies but dressier than Day I… Huh? Dressy shorts and tennies? I copied transcripts and duplicated photos and more than anything else, I ate a lot of crow among my friends who’d heard me scoff at sororities for years.

“Well, 1 like Pi Phi because they all seem so smart,” came one late rush report. “I like the Thetas because most of them remind me of Sarah. I like the Delta Gammas because they’re so natural. I like the Kappas because they’re so diverse.”

“Diverse?” I asked. “You mean they’re not all from California? Not all blondes? What?”

“I mean they’ve got African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanics, Anglos.”

No kidding? No kidding? Oh, my gosh. I turn my back for a couple of decades and look what happens. They let all sorts of folks into my sorority. What a relief. Integrated elitism seems far more palatable than segregated snobbery. It makes the whole business seem almost sort of not too bad, doesn’t it?

Finally I felt vindication, however misplaced. I hadn’t intended to go to her initiation, but she seemed to really want me there, so of course I by God went. That’s how came to be standing there in those, aying all those . When Maurie saw e ing along with the other , ust as though I knew what I was doing, her eyes widened, and she told me later that she had giggled all the way down the hall.

What I’ve learned on the way to rationalization is that sororities no longer carry the social SWAK they once did; few members even bother to wear their pins. A great deal of the mysticism seems to have eroded. Maurie wasn’t the only pledge on the verge of giggles during the ceremony, and my mother says the rituals seemed pretty corny when she was initiated back in 1931, and as far as 1 know, they haven’t changed a word.

The Kappa magazine now features articles on drinking, drugs, date rape, and eating disorders and gives far more space to scholastic achievers and professional accomplishments than to beauty queens and cheerleaders. And recommendations are much easier to come by these days, so more young women are given a fair chance, regardless of who their daddy’s daddy was.

Oh, I’m still uneasy about all this, all right, but when the young black woman (Lisa Myers, UCLA ’89) pinned my mother’s (Betty Bateman, SMU ’31) gold key on my daughter (Maurie Taylor, UCLA ’90), I smiled. Finally, I (Sheila Renfro, TCU ’57) saw some wholly positive elements in the scene after all: continuity and change, both right there, captured in a moment’s ritual.