In the late 19th century, women represented a minority on America’s college campuses. In 1870, there were five times as many male college students as female. The first sororities were spaces where these pioneers of progressive coeducation could enjoy a pro-woman haven and find a sense of belonging.

“The very first sororities were really secret societies for women where they could share their intellectual interests,” said Charlotte Hogg, professor of English and director of composition in the AddRan College of Liberal Arts and author of White Sororities and the Cultural Work of Belonging. “My own sorority, Alpha Delta Pi, was founded as the Adelphean Society in 1851 at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia.”

The organization’s website features its founder, Eugenia Tucker Fitzgerald, who left her family at 16 to enter Wesleyan College. Fitzgerald is quoted, writing of her experience in the third person: “She finds that many of her classmates think more of mischievous enjoyment than their lessons. And so, by and by, a sober thought enters her brain — could she influence her friends to join her in forming an association for improvement?”

Hogg writes that the women who founded the earliest sororities faced restrictive social customs, unequal legal status and the presumption of inferior intelligence.

“Their cause, their founding is very much rooted in feminism, even though they would not have used that word,” Hogg said. “They were rich white women, yes, because that’s who could afford to be in college at the end of the 19th century.”

In 2024, sororities exist in a very different America. Women now outnumber men on college campuses; female students made up 58 percent of undergraduate enrollment in fall 2021. Sororities must also assert their relevance in a culture that is more uncomfortable with gender- or race-based categories and one in which the word sorority might carry negative connotations.

“There is the stereotype that sorority girls are shallow, that they’re all sheep or puppets who do not question the status quo,” Hogg said. “There is the accusation that to rush a sorority is to pay for your friends, which is a gross oversimplification.”

What mocking Saturday Night Live sketches ignore is the real human need for belonging, which sorority membership promises to satisfy. In White Sororities and the Cultural Work of Belonging, Hogg explores the manifold means by which Greek-letter organizations work at every level to engender a sense of belonging.

“There is the accusation that to rush a sorority is to pay for your friends, which is a gross oversimplification,” Charlotte Hogg said.

Belonging to a sorority is “the sum of a lot of small, subtle things,” Hogg said. “On bid day, you open your envelope and find out which sorority you’ll belong to, and the new pledges and the members wear the same bid day shirts featuring your Greek letters. It’s a T-shirt, but you are visibly marked, set apart. … Seeing each other on campus, branded, you feel you belong. You’re visibly connected to each other, to a family, to this past, and you’re the only ones who get to share in this history.”

Aiming for Complexity

While launching her research, Hogg said, she needed to heed the contradictory demands all women endure and the mockery of sororities that saturates pop culture. “Women have long been put upon to affect a performative, everything-to-everyone rhetoric.”

“I wanted to focus on the rhetoric and the question, ‘How does belonging work?’ ”
Charlotte Hogg

About 10 years ago, pop culture outlets such as Jezebel and Gawker mocked sororities for a lack of diversity and for their economic privilege.

“I thought a lot of criticism was earned, but I also felt uncomfortable with how it was so easy to just slam these young women,” Hogg said. “I thought, ‘This still seems pretty sexist.’ We don’t need cruelty to critique.”

The professor said she wanted to avoid being either damning or celebratory in her research. “I wanted to focus on the rhetoric and the question, ‘How does belonging work?’ ”

“It’s the first book-length study of sororities in rhetorical studies and, as such, contributes to [Hogg’s] overall agenda of carving out spaces for discussing those whom academics, and our culture at large, have traditionally trivialized,” said Ann George, professor of English. She said that Hogg’s work “takes seriously groups, especially conservative women, who wield enormous rhetorical power.”

The introduction of White Sororities and the Cultural Work of Belonging establishes a broad definition of rhetoric, which Hogg said “includes more than just words — it’s images, ritual, tradition, clothing, decor.”

Gathering Data

Hogg said her research “centered on sorority artifacts and practices such as pledge books, ceremonies, histories, magazines, websites and accouterments such as pins, clothing and the sorority houses themselves.”

“Sorority houses were originally meant to replicate the domestic space of a home,” Hogg said, “and today’s houses ooze with wealth, civility and cutting-edge decor.”

She interviewed 24 active and alumni sorority members largely from three institutions. Interviews included members who’d pledged in five different decades.

The effort to celebrate the past was evident everywhere, from publications by the National Panhellenic Conference to the YouTube and TikTok videos created to attract pledges.

Hogg writes about how Alpha Delta Pi’s YouTube video promoted a brand refresh. The video toured its redesigned website, noting a customized font that had been generated using the founders’ 19th-century handwriting. This artifactual-looking font scrolls across the website, the skilled use of very 21st-century technology to venerate the past.

Charlotte Hogg, professor of English and director of composition in TCU’s AddRan College of Liberal Arts.

“Highlighting the back and forth between present and past is laying the groundwork for member involvement and belonging,” Hogg said. “All of the work that white sororities do ties back to their founding … which is both wonderful and problematic because those founders were 19th-century, highly privileged, white women.”

Rhetoric at Work

Aristotle first noted the rhetorical power of identifying a person or institution as the first, only or almost only one to have accomplished something, and sororities leverage this tactic.

Hogg cites her sorority’s tagline, “Be the first,” and its motto, “We live for each other.” A sorority’s Founders Day celebrations feature the organization’s sacred songs, chants or cheers, which are recited only by fully initiated members. Hogg said those rituals reinforce the idea that members belong not to a social club, but to a unique, long-standing tradition.

The websites for Greek-letter organizations are the portals to belonging, and the language and images are curated for recruitment and reputation.

Greek-letter organizations’ websites use messaging and imagery to boost recruitment and reputation.

Take the wording on Kappa Alpha Theta’s website, she said: “ ‘But Theta isn’t like other organizations. Our members are different; we aren’t afraid to stand out, to make a difference together.’ ” This broad, clichéd language lacks precise meaning so that it might carry maximal symbolic weight.

Hogg said the intentional vagueness invites readers to apply their own meanings to wording such as sisterhood, values or making a difference. “Nebulous terms say all the right things without doing too much work.”

Complicated Feminism

From clothing to social media to rituals, sororities must walk a rhetorical tightrope whose successful passage includes some version of feminism that’s attractive to Gen Z while “tethering itself,” as Hogg writes, “to the mission and values of sororities lodged in 19th-century gendered expectations for upper- and upper-middle-class white women.”

This feminism has not demanded racial and ethnic diversity and, ironically, seems to reinforce patriarchal structures.

The 2023 Max series Bama Rush followed female aspirants through the drama of rush week at the University of Alabama. The trailer features a young woman who explains that “the rankings [of sororities] come from fraternity boys, so the top house has the hottest girls.”

Charlotte Hogg focuses on creative nonfiction, rhetoric & composition and women’s writing and literacies.

The categorization is unfair, Hogg said. “When we talk about the sorority girl, we’re frequently talking about some of the busiest, most overachieving people on college campuses. I have seen this firsthand as a professor.”

From her college student days, Hogg remembers the magnitude of pinning ceremonies: “We passed around a lit candle. If it was blown out after two times around, it meant the girl [for whom we were gathered] was pinned or going steady with someone. If the candle was blown out after three times around, it meant the girl was engaged to be married,” she said. “There was no such ceremony to mark academic or professional successes.”

The problems with a feminism redirected backward were not lost on the women Hogg interviewed. She said some conversations illustrated the tensions members recognize and accept in exchange for belonging.

One interviewee discussed the conflict between her own feminism and her sorority membership, determining that she could do the best pro-woman work as an insider. “I could do my own thing that is totally separate from [the Greek system],” she said. “But if I speak from within the community, people can take my words at more value.”