Girls Just Want To Have Fun reviews Alexandra Robbins’ Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities:
In one of the few scholarly articles ever written on white sororities, published in American Sociological Review in 1965, John Findley Scott argued that sororities served mainly to provide their members with high-status husbands. The striking thing about the early-’60s sororities that Scott described — with their status-consciousness, their public courtship rituals, and their obsession with sexual reputation — is how much they served the interests of their members’ parents, who traditionally sought to control their daughters’ sexual behavior in order to preserve their marriage value. In serving parental ends, sororities also served those of the colleges and universities charged with overseeing the moral and physical hygiene of their coeds.But college women have considerably more control over their social status these days. [...] With the old marriage goals pushed aside, the rules about ladylike comportment and sexual chastity, designed to reassure future husbands, are increasingly irrelevant. Nonetheless, the old spouse-hunting rituals have been retained — the endless Greek mixers and formals. Add a general relaxing of sexual mores, and combine it with the expanding role of alcohol and drugs in post-1960s campus life, and the battery of courtship rituals designed to enhance the marriage value of sorority women by rationing their sexual availability becomes something rather different.
From one angle, then, sororities have become the problem that they used to be the solution to.