The Opposite of Sorority

The Opposite of Sorority
issue 04 | winter 2007
Continuum - The Opposite of Sorority - Winter 2007

From the outside of mulberry house, there’s no indication that it’s now home to Denison’s state-of-the-art multimedia art lab. But walk through the door and you’ll find the incongruous sight of eighteen immaculate workstations outfitted like candy stores of digital paraphernalia. Since 2003, Mulberry has been a hive of technological creativity and collaboration for the fine arts students and faculty, but it might as well house a nuclear reactor for all its impassive face reveals about its present incarnation, or about why it was abandoned by its original inhabitants, the Delta Gamma chapter of Chi Omega.

University archives show that Chi Omega was the first national sorority established at Denison, in 1928. It met in three different village houses before building this one in 1940, at the center of the cul-de-sac on North Mulberry still known as Sorority Circle. For the next thirty years, this is where the Chi-Os pledged, plotted, partied, and passed motions together.

Nothing in Chi Omega’s file distinguishes it from other sororities: yearbook photos of dreamily-smiling young women, the lists of names and years, the articles detailing their projects, parties, and pledge classes. It’s all standard-issue memorabilia until you come to an application submitted to the Chi Omega Governing Council by Denison’s chapter, requesting the status of “local autonomy” effective at the end of the 1969-70 academic year. The request was granted, and since then its charter has been held in trust by the national office, in the event that the Chi Omegas would want to re-colonize Denison. The reasons for severance aren’t stated. It’s as if the circumstances of the termination are already well known and understood by both parties, and to mention them directly would be either superfluous or bad manners, possibly both.

Chi Omega’s final photographic appearance was a two-page spread in the 1969 Adytum. Candid photos show the sisters enjoying themselves in dress-up hijinks, and three group pictures are needed to identify all of the smiling and laughing women, including six officers. This was not an organization in decline, but sixty-eight young women who were clearly delighted to be associated with each other.

How to explain that by the following year, the Adytum carried no photograph—just a listing of the twenty-two Chi Omegas who chose not to deactivate? These few would retain their national memberships and would be allowed to participate in alumnae groups across the country, but the others severed all ties with the sisterhood for the rest of their lives.

It’s a story tied to its time. The year 1969 was arguably the fulcrum of an era layered with the conflicts of race, class, gender and politics, idealism, and ideology. The previous year, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. In 1969, there were university takeovers, Woodstock, and Altamont. A man walked on the moon. New York’s Stonewall Inn riot launched the gay rights movement. In 1970, four Kent State students would be shot dead and nine wounded by National Guardsmen. At Denison, the traditionally embossed leatherette Adytum would be bound in bright purple fabric, boldly re-titled “High on the Hill,” and the men’s senior portraits would be arranged and identified not in alphabetical order, but by the chronological order of their draft numbers.

Looking at the Chi Omegas in 1969, it’s tempting to suspect that none of these events caused a ripple in their pool. In cable-stitched cardigans, skirts and stockings, they’re a tableau of conservative white womanhood. But look more closely at the faces. You won’t notice the first time, but one isn’t white like the others. Her smile and her clothes are identical to the rest, and her skin is not very dark, but when the eye is scanning a group of such profound conformity for differentiation, even a simple piece of jewelry stands out.

“We were very happy with our pledge class in the fall of 1968, and especially that we ‘stole’ a lovely young woman…from the Kappas, I think,” recalls Diana Holtz Jamieson ’69, who was president of the sorority in 1968-69. “I’m not sure if we anticipated how much trouble we would get into with the national organization, but I think we had an inkling. After we pledged her we came under fire from the local alums of the sorority who could not understand our actions. Some particularly ugly racist comments were made around our desire to break the color barrier.”

The national office promptly and firmly reminded the Denison Chi-Os of the sorority’s “mutual acceptability” clause: any girl they pledged had to be considered “acceptable” to every other chapter in the country. Chi Omega was founded in 1895 at the University of Arkansas, and head-quarters in Fayetteville was very clear that a negro woman would not have been welcomed by its Southern sisters.

Denison’s Chi Omegas were appalled, but not surprised. They had decided to pledge this lovely young woman in the knowledge that it might get them into a bit of trouble and, on some level, they were looking for a bit of trouble. From outside appearances, smoking a cigarette and dancing the Tighten-Up on a Saturday night might have been considered pretty wild behavior at the Chi-O house, but here they were intentionally provoking the leadership of a national organization, one which they had gone to great lengths to join. In many cases, their mothers and grandmothers had been Chi Omegas, and their commitment to the sorority was much more than frivolous. They cared about Chi Omega and its traditions, and they cared about each other, but there was a grain of sand just under the surface, and even if some of them couldn’t name it, they could feel its irritation. The turbulent spirit of change in the country had reached the hearts if not the wardrobes of the Chi-Os. To this day, when they look back on the events that led to the sorority’s demise, former members speak in the ’60s language of idealism: “fighting the good fight,” “our desire for freedom and change,” “breaking the color barrier,” and “standing up for our beliefs.” Susan Amsler Zerwick ’69, then vice president, remembers, “We expected some reaction from the national organization … but I was unprepared for the virulence of that reaction.” Challenging authority was de rigeur for a 20-year-old in 1968, and it was both a heady and unnerving experience.

They found unexpected encouragement from other Chi Omega chapters, and more immediate support from the Denison administration. Dean of Women Elizabeth Hartshorn assured them that the college backed their stand against discrimination. The issue of race was already under formal discussion within the sororities and the Panhellenic Council, and after some sharp confrontation among members of the various chapters, the nine sororities came to agree on an anti-discrimination statement in September of 1968.

Chi Omega’s stand was tested when a national officer appeared on campus unannounced and requested a formal chapter meeting. This was interpreted by the women to be an effort at intimidation, and an opportunity for national to find some out-of-place detail in the ceremonial meeting to serve as a specious excuse for sanctioning the group. As Jamieson recalls, “we made sure everyone showed up in skirts and wearing their sorority pin on very short notice.”

The officer made it clear that the Denison women were not to proceed with their spring initiation. Lyn Seils Robertson ’70, now chair of the Denison Education Studies Department, was a junior Chi-O at the time. She remembers that a chapter meeting was called right after the officer’s visit. The women were shaken enough that they voted at first to go along with national’s mandate. Robertson and others turned in their pins in protest, at which point the majority realized they had made the wrong decision for the wrong reasons. The vote was overturned, pins were returned, and the chapter agreed to initiate the new pledge class in full. For reasons known only to the national office, initiation proceeded without further interference.

It was a victory of sorts. The Chi-Os were proud to have stood their ground and very proud of their new pledges, but seeing this initiation through the lens of their pledge controversy, the women remember an increasingly weighty sense of disillusionment. There was a disconnect in the idea of achieving social change within the structure of a national sorority, by its nature an exclusive organization.

More to the point, the Chi Omegas felt the pressing awareness that no matter what they had achieved symbolically, they were de facto members of a racist organization. The sisterhood was strong, but their sorority was flawed. Many of them came to see the racist implications in the language and the rituals of their initiation process. They had succeeded in pledging and initiating their first black sorority sister, but the national sorority hadn’t accepted their position as much as turned a blind eye to it, which felt a little like winning a game because the opposing team didn’t turn up. “Our hearts were no longer in it,” Jamieson says.

Hearts were being pulled in other directions. Robertson evokes the immediacy of the war’s impact on campus with the name of her classmate, Howie Pyle. “Howie flunked out of Denison that year, was drafted into the war, and was killed within six months.” The war was real, the draft was real, young people were dying, and in that setting, the Chi Omegas found themselves trying to change what would always be a white southern sorority.

They went through an anguishing process as members chose whether or not to deactivate. Most did, gradually draining the lifeblood and the finances from the sorority. Those remaining couldn’t pull together a rush program that spring, and without new members, there was nothing left to do but inform headquarters that they were disbanding.

Jamieson thinks back on what happened to the Chi Omega sorority with mixed emotions, mostly positive. “At the time, it had a great deal of meaning for us to take this stand and come face to face with such narrow-mindedness, and I think we became stronger and smarter. Maybe that is what a sisterhood, not a sorority, is supposed to be.” 

Published December 2007
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