Heroines of the Week; or, Sisterhood is Powerful

I'm not a fan of sororities, for reasons that this article makes clear: but I'm a big fan of the sisters at Delta Zeta in DePauw.

Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit. (My emphasis.)
....
This is not the first time that the DePauw chapter of Delta Zeta has stirred controversy. In 1982, it attracted national attention when a black student was not allowed to join. . .
. . . Delta Zeta’s national leadership . . . tried unsuccessfully to block a young woman with a black father and a white mother from joining its DePauw chapter in 1967.

Despite those incidents, the chapter appears to have been home to a diverse community over the years, partly because it has attracted brainy women, including many science and math majors, as well as talented disabled women, without focusing as exclusively as some sororities on potential recruits’ sex appeal, former sorority members said.
....
A few days after the interviews, national representatives took over the house to hold a recruiting event. They asked most members to stay upstairs in their rooms. To welcome freshmen downstairs, they assembled a meet-and-greet team that included several of the women eventually asked to stay in the sorority, along with some slender women invited from the sorority’s chapter at Indiana University, Ms. Holloway said.

“They had these unassuming freshman girls downstairs with these plastic women from Indiana University, and 25 of my sisters hiding upstairs,” she said. “It was so fake, so completely dehumanized. I said, ‘This calls for a little joke.’ ”

Ms. Holloway (the former chapter president, and one of half dozen women who were apparently pretty enough, but quit out of solidarity with their less-Barbiesque sisters--ed.) put on a wig and some John Lennon rose-colored glasses, burst through the front door during the recruitment event, and skipped around singing “Ooooh! Delta Zeta!” and other chants.

The face of one of the national representatives, she recalled, “was like I’d run over her puppy with my car.”

I love Ms. Holloway, and all the De Pauw women who decided not to put up with Delta Zeta's sexist bullshit. If you read in between the lines of the news story, it's fabulous: they kicked out a computer science major with the research skills to go track down evidence of past discrimination in the library; a junior with the organizational skills and chutzpah to put together an open meeting at the student union to tell the DePauw student body what had really happened; and the editor of the DePauw student paper (what were they thinking?!?).

If Delta Zeta wanted to do a scientific experiment to raise the consciousness of smart, ambitious, accomplished young women, they couldn't have done a better job. I predict that the DePauw students will go on to kick ass and take names for the rest of their lives.

(I couldn't find pictures of the entire sorority chapter; the university--which is on the side of good here--seems to have disabled or moved the page, understandably enough. The two pictures above were the only ones I could find of women named in the article. Meet Kate Holloway (top left), a media fellow at DePauw and the former chapter president, she of the John Lennon glasses and wig--the picture's taken from an announcement that she's doing an internship at USA Today, leading me to suspect she's got something to do with the story hitting the NYT; and Erin Swisshelm, a science research fellow at DePauw, for chrissake (take note, Larry Summers), who is one of the six that quit out of feminist solidarity. Kudos, ladies: you're an example to us all.)