In the fall of 1971, having just turned 17, I checked into the Cheney Hall dorm on the campus of UC Berkeley. I lasted not three weeks before walking into a Dean’s office and declaring my intention to sign up for sorority recruitment, or as it is better known, “rush.” My mother was determined that I was too young for an apartment, even a shared one; but the dorm food was inedible; and my roommate (I had left roommate selection to chance) was showing some alarming signs of mental illness. On a Sunday evening about two weeks into the academic year, I returned fairly late from dinner with my parents. Upon unlocking the door, I tripped over a very large object. My roommate had rearranged the beds and dressers in the center of the room and all on the diagonal. Her bed was now blocking the our room entrance.
I needed a better place to live on campus, and sorority membership, at the time, was in precipitous decline, with many national chapter houses on campus having folded and the remaining all wanting more members. Residence in a sorority house was cheaper than in the dorm, in fact; so it seemed an obvious answer to my problem.
I pledged Pi Beta Phi mostly because I liked the physical plant, a lovely Tudor style mansion on Piedmont Avenue that had once been a private home. At any rate, it was clean, spacious, and attractively decorated; and not only was the food acceptable, but dinner was typically served by nice looking male student “hashers.” The Pi Phis had a season box at the Symphony, which was their chief recommendation in my book. And the girls, most of whom were a lot prettier than I, seemed intelligent and nice.
Pi Phi was actually considered a “top house” at Cal — whatever that meant. (More invites to fraternity parties, perhaps?) I was thankful for having been invited to join a house that was in no danger of disappearing, and grateful the girls had not noticed in the two or three weeks of the informal rush process what a nerd I actually was— socially awkward, spoiled, uninterested in sports or beer busts, and somewhat solipsistic. I wasn’t really ‘top sorority’ material at all.
It has been 50 years since I graduated and left the Pi Phi house; and I can say without hesitation that the experience changed me profoundly in positive ways —not the least of which involved some hard lessons about learning to live with others. I made life long friends among my Pi Phi sisters, several of whom I came to greatly admire as fine, independent women. My daughter's godmother is a sorority sister. As I write, I am planning a visit to another close friend who was a pledge sister.
Which is why I continue to be so confounded by the social media “Bama Rush,” a.k.a. “Rushtok” phenomenon, which has been as viral as ever this fall season. For those who have not been exposed to it: Around seven years ago, young women all over the country started chronicling their sorority recruitment experience on YouTube and TikTok, mostly as a way of showing off their rush party outfits, but also as documentations of the often emotional process of rush —which, as a mutual weeding out process taking place over a very short period of time, invariably involves being summarily cut from potential membership of this or that house to which one has decided one aspires.
The curious thing about these social media videos —which get millions of views each year — is that they are all of nearly identical content: pretty, long-haired college girls either primping or crying, or both primping and crying. More often than not, the TikTok videos involve product endorsements for clothes, shoes, and jewelry. The most famous of these to emerge have been made by incoming freshman women at the University of Alabama. One University of Alabama girl who captured public attention as the “it” Alabama rushee of 2022, carried her “Bamarush” TikTok gambit well beyond sorority recruitment. She has more than a million followers and is said to have made more than a million dollars documenting her activities and wardrobe for the past three years.
It is not surprising that the “Rushtok” internet phenomenon, as popular as it is, has also gleaned plenty of critical commentary as bourgeois, backward, and lily white. Typical of the cultural assessments that have pooh-poohed its appeal was a statement in a New York Times opinion column that today's sorority recruits aspire to be “ideal women from a regional culture that values traditional gender norms.”
Not exactly. Because in my day, no self-respecting sorority girl anywhere in the country could fathom revealing the provenance of a bracelet or bag she owned without being asked about it first, much less imagine broadcasting the name of her favorite boutique to the entire Western world. The “traditional gender norms” that were “valued” in my day held discretion above all other female virtues, most especially as regarded conspicuous displays of wealth. There were some girls in my sorority who were very wealthy, and some who worked to put themselves through school. Mostly everyone dressed simply, and when they didn't, as for special occasions, there was no flaunting of labels.
The girls who have made “Rushtok” famous are also hardly “regional.” And they aren't even exclusively white. They come in all colors from all over the country but not coincidentally the most highly profiled and public of them have gathered at Southern universities that boast large business, finance, media, and public relations departments. Indeed, the University of Alabama graduates twice as many marketing majors as social science majors. So that “Bama” rushees’ attachment to fashion name-dropping, while certainly vulgar, is at least come by honestly. These girls will very likely enter the arena of corporate life straight out of college and be assigned the very same work for which they accumulated so much practice as co-eds: namely, product hawking.
The recruitment video phenomenon is perhaps just one more indication of the extent to which Gen Z women are captivated by the idea of social media monetization. But there is also something a lot deeper at work here, I think: namely, a disposition to portray the college experience as a social endurance challenge, a test that some will pass and others not. In this context, perhaps the most interesting commentary on “Rushtok” was Rachel Fleit’s much anticipated documentary, Bama Rush, which premiered in 2023. It featured the stories of four women primed for University of Alabama sorority recruitment in the fall of 2022. It's a sad and touching film, memorable for its exposure of a great deal of contemporary female anguish and loneliness. None of the girls Ms. Fleit interviewed went into the recruitment experience with the devil-may-care, modest expectations that I did in 1971. Nor did they display the self-confidence and optimism that my pledge sisters seemed to exhibit in force. Rather, all four girls in the film, their formative high school years presumably squandered in the social wildernesses of Facebook and Instagram (not to mention the COVID lock down) came across as very insecure. They longed for a college “home,” along with a set of prescribed rules and ideals to live by. They craved protection from what they clearly identified as past encounters with female bullying and male sexual aggression. They were vying not only for a more secure place in the university social hierarchy, but for a sense of belonging they had hitherto been denied. They were convinced that sorority membership would provide a leg up on a much needed stable support network. Hoping for so much from the sorority experience, they naturally approached the rush process with enormous trepidation, the stakes being, in their view, very high, and failure a real possibility.
Watching that film made me feel grateful to have been young when I was —at a time when a lot of ethnic, racial, and gender barriers to social and career opportunities were crumbling and female egos were much stronger. The path to a college coed’s future seemed so open, free, and above all, hopeful.