Fraternities and Sororities

Antecedents of American Fraternities

The origins of social fraternities have been traced to the student societies at the University of Bologna, Italy, in the eleventh century, which provided living quarters for their members and were based on nationalities (and called “nations”). Similar institutions still exist at certain European schools. Although American social fraternities have their roots in these medieval organizations, they developed more directly from eighteenth-century American college debating and literary societies, such as Phi Beta Kappa. The first such society to have a Greek-letter name, Phi Beta Kappa, was founded at William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1776.

The Early Development of American Fraternities, 1800–1860

Since the eighteenth century, many students at American colleges and universities have attempted to develop a college life for themselves outside the classroom and away from the purview of the faculty. Before the Civil War, most American colleges maintained a spartan and religious regimen. Numerous students—often poorer and older than nowadays—came to college to prepare to be ministers or missionaries, and they found the atmosphere conducive to revivals, prayer, and hard work. These pious students modeled their behavior on that of the faculty, who were, for the most part, scholarly ministers themselves.

On the other hand, wealthier and more urbane students, many of whom found college life oppressive, began to organize Greek-letter fraternities in the 1820s and 1830s, to develop a lifestyle different from that of the faculty, to separate themselves socially from their poorer and more provincial peers, and to engage in conviviality, drinking, and other leisure activities that young men of that class enjoyed. The fraternities were immensely successful. They developed first at two schools in upstate New York—Union College and [Page 510]Hamilton College—and chapters spread rapidly to colleges in the East and the Midwest before the Civil War. Their rituals were modeled after Masonic customs, such as oaths of secrecy, elaborate forms of initiation, and special handshakes. At first, college presidents, faculty, and students who were not members of fraternities strongly opposed the existence of fraternities as divisive, secretive, and inimical to the goals of college life, but they were unable to stop their growth.

Colleges' Acceptance of Fraternities and Sororities

Between the Civil War and World War I, colleges gradually embraced fraternities. National sororities, which began to be established after the Civil War, also gained acceptance during this period. Colleges valued the leadership opportunities that fraternities and sororities afforded their members, such as managing dining rooms, keeping their chapter houses in order, handling budgets of thousands of dollars, and supervising the social and study experiences of their members.

By 1920, fraternities and sororities had become increasingly respectable (and highly visible) partners in the American educational enterprise, and many young men, for example, came to college fully expecting to join one of the two thousand chapters of national fraternities that had been organized at three hundred of the largest university campuses. In the early twentieth century, neither society nor the colleges themselves perceived as major problems those aspects of Greek organizations that are particularly controversial today—hazing, discrimination, sexism, and elitism.

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