How fraternity parties descended from Victorian-style Waltzes to today’s booze-fests
It was all by design
The Amherst College fraternity parties were the most popular events in all of Connecticut Valley. So many people wanted to attend that they had to limit admission: only one party per fraternity per school year.
The students at nearby all-female colleges could attend for free. But if they brought a male date, he had to pay. That’s what funded the booze and entertainment.
The ratio of the parties favored men 3:1. Women danced all night while men cut in whenever they chose. The “stag line” endeared women to men; they were lavished with attention while men could compete for popularity. And between dances, they could always retreat upstairs for a “bit of refreshment.”
It was a system by design.
This was 1929, the peak of fraternity and sorority enrollment in the United States, coinciding with the huge first wave of mass education. According to The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities, by Nicholas L. Syrett, years of economic opulence and a soggy Prohibition made for a college experience that worshipped fraternities, the wealthy social institutions of middle class American youth. Their access to resources and privacy made for some of the most astounding and controversial parties the country had ever seen.
And not much has changed since.
In 1825, the Kappa Alpha Society established the first Greek letter fraternity at Union College in Schenectady, New York. The first female fraternity (they weren’t coined “sororities” until 1882) came in 1856. Both models were founded on academic principles but functioned independently from universities.
Because many colleges at this time were single-sex, fraternities offered some of the only organized, approved social exchanges in an era of strict university oversight. Sororities felt particular pressure: their members not only had to excel in school in an academic climate still suspicious of women, but they were expected to behave with the charm of Victorian society. Waltzes and singing performances were common between Greek houses.
In 1892, fraternities at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill warned women to stay away from unaffiliated men or risk deterring the “more desirable” fraternity brothers. At Ohio State, “The girl who doesn’t go to prom with a fraternity man has a pretty poor chance of a good time, for dances are interchanged among fraternities.” At night fraternity members at places like Stanford broke into sororities to leave vulgar notes and urinate on the porch. At the same time, fraternities were restricting membership from Jews, Irish Catholics deemed low-class, and African-Americans. Athletic recruitment went up in a search for more “masculine” men. Houses were becoming more insular, locking their doors against outsiders in an effort to engineer exclusivity.
According to Syrett, “Fraternity men expected the honors of college life to be theirs.”
The parties just became more sought after.
In the early 20th century, universities attempted to crack down on student freedoms. They operated in loco parentis, educating students but also monitoring their behavior. They “loathed” fraternities, writes Caitlin Flanagan for The Atlantic. “But independence from overbearing faculties — existing on a plane beyond the reach of discipline — was, in large measure, the point of fraternity membership.”
During the 1920s, fraternity members were social kings. Fraternities’ exclusion of the lower classes, the socially awkward, the unattractive, the weak, the non-white, had deepened their power reserves. Members and alumni were wealthy and funneled resources to create a culture that reinforced its own allure: cars, alcohol, drugs, and private houses designed for rule-breaking.
At the same time, sexual prowess marked the most “successful” fraternities. Competitive dating was a near-nightly activity, and fraternity men began to compare notes on which women they had conquered. Fraternity brothers began to openly share details of sexual encounters, a practice theretofore taboo in American society.
In 1926 alternative newspaper the New Student published a short story about a freshman at college. The narrator listens as one of his fraternity brothers tells about a girl he had taken to a dance:
“He had taken her out before, but then she wouldn’t do anything. This time, though, he had given her some whiskey, and stopped the car on a side road, and turned out the lights, and started to neck. He had tried to get his hand on her, but she wouldn’t let him. He had given her some more to drink. He said he hated to think of letting her have all that liquor and not getting anything out of it. The fellows around the table laughed…The second drink had loosened her up, and it had been a cinch; she had given hotter’n hell.”
Though college women still tended to reserve sexual intercourse, they often engaged in petting, and fraternities offered plenty of private spaces and events to do so.
Toward the end of the decade, drinking went from competitive bouts between individuals to social drinking in mixed-gender groups. And the predatory behavior we associate with most fraternities today followed.
In his novel My Son Is a Splendid Driver, playwright Willing Inge recounts an experience believed to be his own, at the University of Kansas in the late 1920s. The protagonist engages in a “gang-bang” in the fraternity basement house. Their female targets calls the brothers “snob sonsabitches,” implying a lack of consent. Inge writes, “I felt that to have refused would have cast doubts upon my masculinity, an uncertain thing at best, I feared, that daren’t hide from any challenge.”
By this time, the sexualized party culture of wealthy, white, male fraternities was cemented. Says Syrett, “Fraternity men in large part completed the transition to a standard of masculinity that is recognizable to us today.”
Fraternities would not see another spike in membership until the 1970s. Throughout the Great Depression, college attendance dropped unilaterally. During World War II, many fraternities closed all together. Some were taken over as residence for armed service members who trained at university facilities. There was no money—and no men—for such extravagances. After the war, veterans returned to campuses, but they were older than other underclassmen and often married. They just wanted to finish their degrees and move on with life. This hurt fraternity membership.
As anti-establishment sentiment grew in the 1960s in response to the Vietnam War, students revolted against the heavy-handed college rules that thwarted campus social life. “If they were old enough to die in Vietnam, powerful enough to overthrow a president, groovy enough to expand their minds with LSD and free love, then they certainly didn’t need their own colleges — the very places where they were forming their radical, nation-changing ideas — to treat them like teenyboppers in need of a sock hop and a chaperone,” writes Flanagan. And fraternities represented the very conservative ethos these radicals sought to dismantle. Once private spaces outside the prying eyes of the university, fraternities were suddenly square; they didn’t offer anything hippies weren’t smoking in their own dorm rooms. Membership plummeted further, and hundreds of chapters closed.
Then in 1978, everyone watched Animal House. The screaming sensation predicted and arguably directed America toward a fraternity renaissance. The movie captured the union of the 1960s sexual revolution and the forthcoming “self-serving materialism” of the 1980s in one giant, raucous blowout. Students again flocked to the classist ceremony and clannish rituals of the Greek system.
Congress sealed this new era of students into fraternity basements when it passed the National Minimum Age Drinking Act in 1984, raising the legal limit and pushing young people further underground, this time with new drugs and sexual perspectives. Fraternities represented an enticing paradox: they were sanctioned spaces where underage people could do illegal things.
Once American universities all but abandoned the “smothering parent” approach to focus primarily on academia, students, well, acted like you would expect Mark Cuban to act in the 1970s. The lawsuits followed — in droves.
Fraternity parties hosted rape, injury, prejudice, and death. Attorney Douglas Fierberg told The Atlantic the fraternity system is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” It’s also protected by law, rakes in tons of money, and maintains an arms-distance relationship with the universities that could otherwise control it.
Fraternities have graduated some of the country’s wealthiest, vocal, and loyal alumni. They bring in loads of fundraising, cushion struggling university endowments, and offer housing alternatives that would cost many schools millions to replace. And when universities attempt to banish houses, fraternities assert their right to freedom of association. Time and time again, they have been saved by their independence from the institutions they rely on.
Are the frat parties worth it? No. Countless sexual assault survivors will tell you that. (Frat brothers rape three times more often than the average college male.) But this entrenched national system of wealth, social opportunity, alumni perks, and wild keggers isn’t likely to be overthrown anytime soon. And that’s not an accident. It was designed that way.
