"Get Excited People!": Gendered Acts of Literacy in a Social Sorority

Gendered Performances and Women's Leadership in Social Sororities

The recovery of women’s rhetoric, Carol Mattingly notes, tends to seek out the rhetoric of groups that “most resemble academic feminists” ideologically regardless of the actual scope of their influence (101). For example, feminist scholars “praise” the leaders of the National Woman Suffrage Association because of its liberal values over the more conservative Women’s Christian Temperance Union, although the latter had a significantly greater membership (Mattingly 102). In their 2012 survey of the field of feminist rhetorical criticism, Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch stress the importance of a broader, deeper, and more inclusive view of women’s rhetoric, recommending a focus on “places at which we have not looked seriously or methodically before” in the hopes that such analysis will help feminist rhetorical scholars “think again about what women’s patterns of action seem to suggest about rhetoric, writing, leadership, activism, and rhetorical expertise” (72). Janine Solberg, for example, explains how women’s stenography work in the early twentieth-century office that appears entirely clerical actually draws on significant domain knowledge and contextual knowledge. Solberg’s work demonstrates the importance of “digging up” contemporary women’s rhetorical leadership in research sites that may seem insubstantial in terms of literacy, even to the most astute feminist observer. Solberg writes, “as historiography in composition and rhetoric continues to broaden and mature, we must continue to ask whose literacy experiences are being left out” (17).

 

With over 300,000 members on over 600 campuses in the United States and Canada (National Panhellenic Conference), social sororities are one of the most powerful communities to which many female college students might belong in their college years. Historian Diana Turk’s research on sorority life suggests that the first sororities in the 1870s created opportunities for women to perform the role of “college student” previously only available to men. These sororities supported women intellectually and socially amidst hostility from male students who believed that women in higher education disrupted the “natural order” of society (Turk 3). In sorority chapter meetings, women practiced speeches for each other and pressured each other to do well in school to represent their sorority and campus women as a whole in a positive light. To counteract common arguments that attending college was “unwomanly,” sororities broadened the definition of proper “womanhood” to encompass both social skills and intellectual capacities (Turk 40). Sororities made no distinction between married and unmarried women and supported women who chose to enter the workforce rather than have children. Graduates could use their sorority connections after college to enter “previously closed or difficult-to-enter fields” (Turk 153). In short, sororities from the 1870s through the 1900s enabled gendered performances along a spectrum of feminism.

 

In the 1920s, when the presence of women became a more normal part of college life, sororities “jettisoned their academic and literary work in favor of social activities” and became more of the social clubs they are today (Turk 47). Possibly as a result of this social focus, contemporary investigations into sorority life suggest that they actually validate rigid and traditional gendered behaviors. In Inside Greek U.: Fraternities, Sororities, and the Pursuit of Pleasure, Power, and Prestige Alan D. DeSantis finds that “fraternities and sororities fiercely reproduce many of the most traditional and harmful ideas about gender through their scripted performances” because “the rigidity of the Greek institution produces a subculture where deviant performances—performances that are potentially liberating because of their ability to expand brothers’ and sisters’ gendered repertoire—are prohibited” (27). Specific studies of sorority life suggest that sorority culture propagates traditional gender roles, leading to the stigmatization of sorority involvement. Lisa Handler’s study of sororities as “gender strategy” demonstrates that though women use sororities as a means of exploring ideas about womanhood, they remain “marked by the inequalities that characterize gender relations in the wider society” (252). In a similar vein, Barbara J. Risman also finds that sororities encourage behaviors that socialize women into marriage and staying at home with children. Risman writes that her findings are “not to suggest that none of these women will become surgeons, lawyers, or executives; only that the selves they have nurtured while in college will need considerable reorganization if and when they enter demanding occupational social worlds” (138). So while historical sororities worked to carve out a place for university women institutionally, contemporary practices of sororities and fraternities suggest that they do not support a range of gendered identities.

 

Though sororities have been studied as sites of women’s acclimation to both college and the social world beyond, what remains intriguing and un-studied about sororities is how they offer women a chance to be leaders. Sororities and fraternities value leadership, planning leadership retreats for members, requiring leadership conferences for executive members, and marketing their organizations for their leadership opportunities (Hevel, Martin, and Pascarella 268). In my own yearlong ethnography of a social sorority, both alumnae and current members said that leadership was one of the most important things they learned in their time at the sorority and one of the key reasons they joined in the first place. Leadership also resonates with the sorority’s practices: alumnae who travel to visit chapters to help with projects are called “leadership consultants,” the national organization sponsors a “leadership institute” every summer, and elected and appointed roles are referred to as “leadership positions.” The discourse of the sorority frames the women as leaders, and the emphasis on leadership re-frames the sorority as less of a social club and more of a pre-professional organization.

 

Because writing is one way young people learn and enact gender roles (Peterson and Parr), studying women’s writing in a sorority can suggest how college-age women learn to “perform” gender at this stage in their lives, particularly how they wield and experiment with forms of power and leadership in their writing. Despite the advances of feminism, women of the millennial generation still express hesitation about being leaders. Surveys show that while millennial women believe they are as ambitious and charismatic as men, “they are slightly less likely to see themselves as leaders, visionaries, self-confident, or willing to take risks” (Bentley University 17). A 2008 study of millennial girls by the Girl Scout Research Institute found that girls said they did not want to be leaders because they were afraid of “being laughed at, making people mad at them, coming across as bossy, or not being liked by people” (Schoenberg 19). The Steering Committee on Undergraduate Women’s Leadership at Princeton University reported that while undergraduate women did much of the strategic planning for student groups, they were less likely to take on visible leadership positions or play up their credentials and experience (Steering Committee).

 

Moreso than undergraduate men, undergraduate women fear the criticism that may come with a highly visible persona (Steering Committee). Research bears out these fears, demonstrating the penalties women face for taking on leadership positions, particularly in male-dominated fields. A psychological study by Madeline Heilman and Tyler Okimoto found that people tended to view successful women as being too individualistic and lacking in compassion (81). In particular, women perceived as successful managers were also perceived as selfish, deceitful, and cold (81). People held these perceptions of female managers regardless of whether or not the female managers performed nurturing and community-oriented behaviors in the workplace. As Heilman and Okimoto conclude, “It thus appears to take little more than the knowledge that a woman is successful at male sex-typed work [such as being a boss or manager] to instigate interpersonally negative reactions to her” (82). And although the all-female audience of a sorority may alleviate some of these pressures because women are less likely to encounter resistance in an area that is understood as a “feminine context” (Ridgeway 648), the traditional gender performances scripted in the sorority mean that women may continue to encounter resistance to their leadership.

 

In conducting a yearlong ethnography of a social sorority using the tools of third-wave feminist linguistic analysis, I was interested in how acts of literacy were also gendered acts of leadership. In particular, I wanted to know how the women’s writing in leadership positions navigated complex expectations about gender and leadership. I chose to analyze a set of twenty-seven e-mails written by the sorority’s Director of Administration, “Polly,” to convince sorority members to attend the group’s events. Many of the sorority’s literacy practices functioned to organize and manage the group, but many were also copied or only slightly altered from model texts. These e-mails, however, were mostly Polly’s own creation. They were even more of Polly’s own creation because this particular chapter of the sorority had opened on campus only a year before Polly took her position, meaning that only one other person had ever done her job. Polly thus had a fair amount of freedom in composing the e-mails.

 

The e-mails were sent only to members and so did not bear the burden of explaining the sorority to outsiders or developing the sorority’s external image. They did, however, bear the burden of motivating women to attend multiple activities every week, a situation complicated by the sorority’s positioning in the university. Because this research took place at a small, residential university, many students on campus were involved and held leadership positions in pre-professional clubs, social clubs, residence hall councils, community service organizations, and faith-based groups. Students’ calendars were full of all-campus events like speakers, sporting events, receptions, and other celebrations. The sorority participated in the Panhellenic council, the campus’ umbrella organization for sorority life, which planned events that challenged sororities to compete against each other; a large part of “winning” these events was having the most members attend. The national organization of the sorority also set forth practices, standards, and guidelines for the functioning of individual chapters, which meant further obligations for the women in terms of the kinds of events they had to hold and the expectations for attendance at these events. All of these institutionalized pressures meant that sorority members had significant obligations to attend events, so the sorority leadership developed systematic literacy practices like the weekly e-mail to motivate them to do so.

 

Polly’s formidable challenge was to inspire 110 over-committed, academically driven women to attend anywhere from five to ten events per week. Polly told me that that attendance at events was a problem:

Faith: What kinds of things do you have to work hard to motivate people to do?
Polly: I think the things that aren’t mandatory, anything like that. Sisterhood events, other people’s philanthropy events, if we don’t make a big deal out of it, don’t tell them to sign up for it, no one wants to go.
Faith: They signed up for the sorority; I assume they knew what it involved. So why are there problems with getting people to participate?
Polly: That is a big thing. People don’t go to things and we’ve always had that question and tried to answer it and I think that they feel like there’s so much going on. A lot of members were like, “We’re too over-programmed!” But we are the leadership team and we go to everything and we still do homework. People just get in the mindset that they don’t have to go and they have better things to do.

The e-mails had to be a thoughtful, audience-driven, and strategic communication inspired to get people to decide that they do not “have better things to do” but that the sorority’s events are the best things to do every week. Polly also faces gendered expectations about how women should act, which are amplified by the traditional gender roles of a sorority. Sorority members may stereotype her as “bossy” or may dislike her if she is too commanding or domineering. She has to maintain a relatively professional persona so that people will take her and her organization seriously, similar to the challenge faced by student writers working in adult-driven professional organizations (see for example Deans; Ketter and Hunter). But Polly also wants to be relatable and friendly, inserting her personality and voice into her writing, a task more similar to that faced by students in extracurricular writing situations (see for example Roozen; Comstock; Haas et al.). In each e-mail, Polly has to write with an audience in mind to capture the interests of the membership, negotiate her role as both a peer and a leader to maintain friendships, and represent herself and the group in a positive light.

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Between September 2012 and May 2013, my graduate assistant, Anne M. Dimond, and I interviewed thirty total members of the sorority: ten members of the chapter’s leadership team, fifteen women in peripheral involvement positions, four new members who joined the chapter after the recruitment process in January 2013, and one woman who went through the recruitment process but joined another sorority. In our interviews, we asked the women to narrate their paths of participation in to the sorority, describing and explaining their motivations for participation. To triangulate my analyses of their experiences, I interviewed twelve sorority alumnae and seven campus staff members involved in fraternity/sorority life both about their own fraternity/sorority experience and about their theories of student learning and participation in fraternity/sorority life. I attended fifty-two total events, including weekly chapter meetings, leadership team meetings, and fundraising events. I collected written artifacts as well, including newsletters, minutes, officer position applications, PowerPoint presentations, forms, and handbooks.

 

I interviewed Polly near the end of her one-year term to understand her writing process. I worked with an undergraduate researcher, Carolyn German¹ who was also a member of a campus sorority, to develop questions for a discourse-based interview (Odell, Goswami, and Herrington). Discourse-based interviews are a means of understanding “non-classroom, tacit writing knowledges” that a writer derives “through repeated experience” (223). In this method, the interviewer collects a body of writing and interviews the writer about alterations the writer made at different points. A typical question would ask, for example, why the writer uses a formal greeting in one e-mail and a humorous greeting in another e-mail. This methodology is useful for identifying sub-conscious and taken-for-granted writing practices that writers do not articulate on a daily basis (228).

 

Carolyn and I compared and contrasted all of the e-mails to develop a list of interview questions for Polly about her various rhetorical choices. I was concerned that I would make too much of Polly’s choices, and I did not want her to feel like she had to make up a reason for any choice. As a member of a campus sorority who had held a leadership position, Carolyn helped me to identify rhetorical strategies that were likely more intentional on Polly’s part. For example, I wanted to classify every use of an exclamation point as a rhetorical strategy, but Carolyn noted that sorority women often used exclamation points offhandedly. Carolyn identified the more intentional exclamation points: those that served the purpose of getting the readers excited about doing something that they otherwise might not be excited to do. For example: “Be sure to know when your tabling time is and be there promptly when your scheduled shift starts so others who have class can get to it!” As Polly confirmed for us in her interview, the exclamation point here makes an otherwise demanding sentence sound exciting and conversational. I believe that, for the most part, we were able to highlight the rhetorical strategies that held meaning for Polly.

 

Polly said in the interview that she wrote her e-mails in short, easily digestible paragraphs so that members could use the e-mails as a reference for the whole week. Carolyn and I segmented each e-mail into separate paragraphs, because we wanted each segment to reflect Polly’s view of the composing process of the e-mail (usually, each paragraph had a heading and was in a different color). We only diverged from this process of segmenting at a handful of instances where we noticed a distinct tonal shift, such as an instance where the first few sentences of the paragraph were informational and the last sentence was humorous.

 

Once the data were separated into segments, our next step was to create a coding scheme to identify and classify Polly’s rhetorical strategies. Polly told me that during the chapter’s weekly meeting (typically occurring on a weeknight at 9 PM), she takes notes in a notebook. Though the meetings often have a PowerPoint presentation, Polly told me she crafts the weekly e-mail mostly from memory and her notes. These notes, however, are only a skeleton of what actually appears in the e-mail. Polly allowed me to take a photo of the handwritten notes she took for one of the weekly e-mails, part of which I have transcribed below along with the corresponding line from the final version of the e-mail to make her additions apparent (see Table 1).

 

Table 1. Comparison of Polly’s Handwritten Notes and Her Final Written E-mail.

Polly's Handwritten Notes	The Final E-mail
Next week is formal chapter with elections --Pins	Next week’s chapter is formal, and elections will be held during this time. Make sure you are dressed all fancy like and wear yo pins, bring yo hankies to congratulate girls, and look all classy.2
Polish on Sunday 1-5 --Wear Philanthropy Day Outfit --Black/white w accent of red	Polish on Sunday from 1-5. Make sure to wear your philanthropy day clothes so we can catch and make sure y’all are lookin’ fiiiiine as eva. Philanthropy day remember is black, white, and a red accent.
7-10 Room 310 Day Chairs Meeting	Day chairs: Your meeting is tomorrow from 7-10 in Room 310! Holla

 

Based on the comparison between her handwritten notes and the final e-mail, Carolyn and I identified a “rhetorical strategy” as anything beyond the basic factual information of the sorority’s activities that week. We coded basic factual information, such as a declarative sentence stating the time and date of an event, as “null.”

 

Carolyn created the first draft of the coding scheme using grounded theory (Charmaz), an analytical method that creates theories that are “grounded” in the data, leading to a theoretical understanding of participants’ experiences. I tested out Carolyn’s coding scheme on the first two e-mails, and we revised the coding scheme together so that we could both use the coding scheme consistently. To apply the codes to the rest of the data, we used a method Peter Smagorinsky calls “collaborative coding,” developed from and greatly influenced by Vygotsky’s work on the social construction of language (401). Smagorinsky works with a doctoral student to “discuss each data segment before agreeing on how to bracket and code it,” reaching agreement “through collaborative discussion” (401). To mitigate issues of power, Smagorinsky works with students with areas of expertise “complementary” to his own (401). Carolyn’s membership in a campus sorority and her expertise in undergraduate slang complemented my expertise in the sorority from my ethnographic research. Carolyn and I independently assigned codes to the segments in five of the twenty-seven e-mails and then met to discuss areas of disagreement and revise the coding scheme. She and I coded the rest of the interviews on our own, after which we met again to discuss areas of disagreement and come to consensus, again revising the coding scheme.

 

We ended up with 402 total segments of data coded into seven different categories: flattery, incentive, excitement, nudge of encouragement, silly humor, strategic humor, and null. Below, I explain each strategy as a gendered act of literacy, focusing on the way the strategies respond to a specific social context.

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Leading By Emotion: Excitement