Sorority Sisterhood Quotes

She drew herself up and crossed her arms over her chest. “So Buck can enjoy sitting in a cell contemplating how he blew up his life. That dickwad hurt two people sitting at this table. And you’re worried about who’ll look bad if they tell? Screw that. Dean and D.J. and Kennedy and every frat boy on this campus can all go fuck themselves. Are we sisters or not?

And it feels very similar to rushing a sorority; the planned conversation with the more important sorority sisters, always pretty, usually white, who've already gone through a list of photos and have their favorites pegged and the answers to their questions preloaded. "Oh, no way! You were a cheerleader, too?! So was I! You'll fit in so well in our house!" Meanwhile, we, of source, knew she was a cheerleader because we spent days studying the rushee's photos and applications, and we already knew which ones we'd be attacking. And here I am, in my mid-thirties, re-creating the same behavior to sell a similar promise of a different sisterhood.

If we consider the possibility that all women–from the infant suckling her mother’s breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasmic sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother’s milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia, who share a laboratory; to the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women–exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not. It allows us to connect aspects of woman-identification as diverse as the impudent, intimate girl-friendships of eight- or nine-year-olds and the banding together of those women of the twelfth and fifteenth centuries known as Beguines who “shared houses, rented to one another, bequeathed houses to their room-mates … in cheap subdivided houses in the artisans’ area of town,” who “practiced Christian virtue on their own, dressing and living simply and not associating with men,” who earned their livings as spinners, bakers, nurses, or ran schools for young girls, and who managed–until the Church forced them to disperse–to live independent both of marriage and of conventual restrictions. It allows us to connect these women with the more celebrated “Lesbians” of the women’s school around Sappho of the seventh century B.C.; with the secret sororities and economic networks reported among African women; and with the Chinese marriage resistance sisterhoods–communities of women who refused marriage, or who if married often refused to consummate their marriages and soon left their husbands–the only women in China who were not footbound and who, Agnes Smedley tells us, welcomed the births of daughters and organized successful women’s strikes in the silk mills. It allows us to connect and compare disparate individual instances of marriage resistance: for example, the type of autonomy claimed by Emily Dickinson, a nineteenth-century white woman genius, with the strategies available to Zora Neale Hurston, a twentieth-century black woman genius. Dickinson never married, had tenuous intellectual friendships with men, lived self-convented in her genteel father’s house, and wrote a lifetime of passionate letters to her sister-in-law Sue Gilbert and a smaller group of such letters to her friend Kate Scott Anthon. Hurston married twice but soon left each husband, scrambled her way from Florida to Harlem to Columbia University to Haiti and finally back to Florida, moved in and out of white patronage and poverty, professional success and failure; her survival relationships were all with women, beginning with her mother. Both of these women in their vastly different circumstances were marriage resisters, committed to their own work and selfhood, and were later characterized as “apolitical ”. Both were drawn to men of intellectual quality; for both of them women provided the ongoing fascination and sustenance of life.

Well, if it’s for a paper, then my honest answer is that I think sororities are bad. I think they’re terrible, actually. I think they make girls feel awful about themselves under the guise of sisterhood.

Sing a hymn to rectitude, Ye forward-thinking multitude. Advance in humble gratitude For strictest rules of attitude. To elevate the Common Good In Brotherhood and Sisterhood We celebrate authority. Fraternity, Sorority, United, pressing onward, we Restrict the ills of liberty. There is no numinosity Like Power's generosity In helping curb atrocity. Bear down on the rod and foil the child.

Today, because of its faculty, its wealth, and its ties to the large Atlanta University system, Spelman is still able to compete successfully for the same students who are being accepted by Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, the other Seven Sisters colleges, and Ivy League universities. At Spelman, unlike most women’s colleges, more than 80 percent of its faculty hold doctorates, and more than a third of the students major in mathematics, engineering, or the sciences. When I encounter Spelman women of my own generation or of my mother’s generation, I recognize a sisterhood and a camaraderie that I have never seen among black women who attended predominately white women’s colleges or who have joined sororities at other historically black schools. Because it very much identifies itself to the world and to its students as the ultimate college for black women, these students and alumni are fiercely loyal to, and respectful of, this Atlanta institution.

A group of same-aged people is inherently unstable. Peers will compete just as siblings compete. The ancestral sorority was transgenerational, and if we want whatever strength and balm may come from sisterhood, it wouldn’t hurt to recapitulate in some measure the timeworn model and brace our listing library of cohorts with bookends of the young and the seasoned.

What makes me the proudest about Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., is that she truly lives up to the ideals and principles she stands for. This sisterhood is proactive and is ever progressing, never settling, and always upholding the highest level of expectations of the membership and all that she comes in contact with. At the forefront of any major change you will always see a Delta; the leadership of any progressing organization always had a Delta in the midst. My sisters are dynamic in all their ways and that makes me proud to be a Delta. They are examples of the essence of Fortitude in every sense of the word! —LaKesha Russ, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

The belief that women are more powerful when they band together in what has been called sisterhood is disempowering. That men believe they can and should do something by their own ingenuity and skills on their own is an important advantage. Not just feminists believe in the notion of feminine solidarity — a sort of lifetime sorority — but feminists have promoted it relentlessly. It is a disabling fallacy.