Review Of Pledged: The Secret Life Of Sororities, By Alexandra Robbins

The purpose of this paper is to review and analyze student cultures in the book Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, by Alexandra Robbins. The book provides a glimpse of the historically white national sorority system and investigates their secret group behavior. In the United States and Canada, approximately 800 institutions host social Greek Life on their campuses (Long, 2012). These chapters within the Greek Life system promote the ideals of scholarship, leadership, service, and friendship. However, in the Robbins’ book and narrative of a sorority illustrates sorority life and negative realities of that system, such as rush, bid, racism, pledging, initiation, Greek Week, breaks-up and sexual assaults.

Initially, Robbins was interested

A weakness of selecting certain sorority members based on the author’s discretion holds bias because of its convenient sampling. Robbins’ selection of particular participants may not fully represent the population, even though Robbins indicated that one of the sorority members would be a positive representative of the national organization. In addition, the participants are only from one institution and a small sample size. Robbins’s lack of details of her methodology of how she obtained their experiences and not using real names or locations to conceal her sources' identities lacks credibility. In addition, this challenges higher education professionals can do to solve these issues of superficial values and dangerous practices, especially since all sorority houses tend to have different reputations on different

Throughout the book, the sorority and the national sorority system employs dualistic behaviors and attitudes in regards to how they speak, dress, and act. Sorority members are pressured to conform to that stereotype to keep with the sorority image, such as when multiple sorority girls were getting a certain body part pierced, the president of the sorority who is tasked with serving as a role model conforms to getting her nipples pierced. The dualistic behaviors started when the “house mom” was the authority figure and set the rules in terms of sorority women cannot smoke in front of the house, which can destroy their reputation. Furthermore, the mentality that one of the sorority girls had to conform and break off her relationship with her friends and boyfriend to fit in with her sorority and behave in a certain way during the date night parties support dualistic behaviors. Not only are these sororities pressured to conform to a sorority identity, the weight of continuing a legacy of which their family was a member of furthers the struggles that these students experience. The relationship with alumni of a national sorority chapter illustrates the external influences of alumni as constituents and integral part of an institution (Kuh & Whitt,