intense period when aspiring fraternity or sorority members make the rounds of all the parties—ice-water teas, we called them—trying to find the right fit. One of the teas I attended was at Chi Omega, whose house was as big as a Mississippi riverboat, and filigreed with wrought-iron balconies just like a French Quarter town house. And when we started hearing back, it was Chi O whose bid I accepted. For the rest of my college days, my Chi O sisters would stand in for my family, offering me the warm and welcoming stability of a home away from home.
But it wasn’t a perfect system, to be sure. There was something contrived about the hasty bonding of sorority sisters that didn’t always sit right with me. And for all the apparent closeness we felt in the sorority house, if anyone there was harboring secrets, nobody really talked about them. If you suffered from an eating disorder or depression or anything that would make others think you were less than perfect, you never, ever brought it up. Now and then we’d hear a girl throwing up in the bathroom, and we’d know, but we pretended not to hear. A Southern lady didn’t talk about such things.
In a world of twenty-four-hour Jerry Springer confessionals, it’s easy to feel that people have grown all too ready to open up their private lives for public consumption. But there we were, a houseful of girls in this exciting yet vulnerable time in our lives, living together as a family, yet suffering silently, deathly afraid to air anything that resembled dirty laundry. Today, at least, a woman can address her problems openly, with friends, counselors, even family. But back then all that mattered was what was proper. Years after we graduated, one of my sorority sisters wrote me and revealed that she’d been sexually abused as a child. And when I think of her carrying that burden alone for so long, I’m glad that this is one old-school legacy my children won’t share.
Along those lines, we didn’t talk much about sex. Of course, we did spend plenty of time thinking about boys, as sorority sisters everywhere are prone to do. I remember driving around campus, thinking, My husband is around here somewhere . But this was 1974, and Alabama was a pretty conservative place. Remember Lynyrd Skynyrd’s line from “Sweet Home Alabama”: “Watergate doesn’t bother me/Does your conscience bother you?” That pretty much described the atmosphere at the university. College campuses elsewhere might have been the sites of freewheeling, seventies-era sexuality, but for all practical purposes the sexual revolution hadn’t yet arrived in Tuscaloosa.
The sorority environment was designed to prevent vice more than encourage virtue: there was always somebody watching over you. Kiss your date good night on the front porch, and you’d get slapped with a fine; God forbid the two of you should stay out all night together, for you’d return to find they’d put a chair in your bed on the sleeping porch, a signal of your wicked ways. When my Catholic suitemate Ginger and I began getting more involved with our first serious boyfriends, we stayed up late at night searching the Bible for clues about just how far we could go with them and still avoid the stain of sin. We were so earnest, so sweet—and so naive!
But the real key to social life in my college days wasn’t dating—it was football. Oh, to be in Denny Stadium on a Saturday afternoon in the fall! Everyone dressed up, as fine as if they were going to church: the guys in jacket and sometimes tie, we girls in dresses. Families came from miles around to join their daughters at the sorority houses for lunch, and then we’d all walk ceremonially over to the stadium. The air would be crisp with autumn and anticipation. For the really big games, we all packed up and headed to Birmingham, which had a larger stadium to accommodate the overflow crowds. Cars and RVs streamed in from all over the state, decorated with crimson and
But it wasn’t a perfect system, to be sure. There was something contrived about the hasty bonding of sorority sisters that didn’t always sit right with me. And for all the apparent closeness we felt in the sorority house, if anyone there was harboring secrets, nobody really talked about them. If you suffered from an eating disorder or depression or anything that would make others think you were less than perfect, you never, ever brought it up. Now and then we’d hear a girl throwing up in the bathroom, and we’d know, but we pretended not to hear. A Southern lady didn’t talk about such things.
In a world of twenty-four-hour Jerry Springer confessionals, it’s easy to feel that people have grown all too ready to open up their private lives for public consumption. But there we were, a houseful of girls in this exciting yet vulnerable time in our lives, living together as a family, yet suffering silently, deathly afraid to air anything that resembled dirty laundry. Today, at least, a woman can address her problems openly, with friends, counselors, even family. But back then all that mattered was what was proper. Years after we graduated, one of my sorority sisters wrote me and revealed that she’d been sexually abused as a child. And when I think of her carrying that burden alone for so long, I’m glad that this is one old-school legacy my children won’t share.
Along those lines, we didn’t talk much about sex. Of course, we did spend plenty of time thinking about boys, as sorority sisters everywhere are prone to do. I remember driving around campus, thinking, My husband is around here somewhere . But this was 1974, and Alabama was a pretty conservative place. Remember Lynyrd Skynyrd’s line from “Sweet Home Alabama”: “Watergate doesn’t bother me/Does your conscience bother you?” That pretty much described the atmosphere at the university. College campuses elsewhere might have been the sites of freewheeling, seventies-era sexuality, but for all practical purposes the sexual revolution hadn’t yet arrived in Tuscaloosa.
The sorority environment was designed to prevent vice more than encourage virtue: there was always somebody watching over you. Kiss your date good night on the front porch, and you’d get slapped with a fine; God forbid the two of you should stay out all night together, for you’d return to find they’d put a chair in your bed on the sleeping porch, a signal of your wicked ways. When my Catholic suitemate Ginger and I began getting more involved with our first serious boyfriends, we stayed up late at night searching the Bible for clues about just how far we could go with them and still avoid the stain of sin. We were so earnest, so sweet—and so naive!
But the real key to social life in my college days wasn’t dating—it was football. Oh, to be in Denny Stadium on a Saturday afternoon in the fall! Everyone dressed up, as fine as if they were going to church: the guys in jacket and sometimes tie, we girls in dresses. Families came from miles around to join their daughters at the sorority houses for lunch, and then we’d all walk ceremonially over to the stadium. The air would be crisp with autumn and anticipation. For the really big games, we all packed up and headed to Birmingham, which had a larger stadium to accommodate the overflow crowds. Cars and RVs streamed in from all over the state, decorated with crimson and
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