When I was growing up, I loved my mother's stories about Stanford. Frances Smith Leavitt, '47, told me how she had to shimmy up a drainpipe along the outside of Roble to her second-floor room because she'd missed her curfew, or how she would rather play the Stanford golf course than go to the library. Freshman year, she pledged Kappa Kappa Gamma.
Due to circumstances that probably involved the drainpipe or the golf course, my mother did not make her grades and was not permitted to attend the Kappa initiation ceremony with the rest of her pledge class. In the spring of 1944, her grades improved and she became a full member of KKG. Shortly after that, sororities were abolished at Stanford. The war had skewed the gender balance on campus, and competition for housing between Greek and non-Greek students became untenable. As she tells it, my mother was the last woman to join a sorority at Stanford.
When I arrived at Stanford in the early '70s, I was relieved that there were no sororities. I didn't have to decide whether to follow my mother's path or reject it. When my mother's friends asked if I would be going through rush, I was happy to be able to say that that wasn't an option. Visiting friends in sorority houses at Berkeley, I was a little unnerved by the profoundly female atmosphere, the looming presence of a housemother, and the parlor—in full view of the rest of the house—which was the only place male visitors were permitted. Although my coed dorm in Wilbur was gender segregated by floor, we had no curfew, no hovering housemother and no visitor restrictions. We were free to socialize as we pleased and concentrate on the weighty concerns of the day—protesting the war or camping out all night to buy Rolling Stones tickets. Sororities seemed about as relevant as white gloves.
When my daughter, Laura Lilly, '12, was assigned to Roble for her freshman year, my mother was amused at the idea that Roble—the freshman girls' residence in her day—now housed boys in every other room. Well, my mother noted philosophically, at least Laura wouldn't have to climb the drainpipe.
I was vaguely aware that sororities were reintroduced to Stanford in 1977, but I was stunned when Laura, a self-described science nerd, called to say she had pledged one. "I pledged Kappa! Just like Grandmother!" she squealed when I picked up the phone. She liked the idea that Kappas were unhoused, she explained: She'd have the opportunity to befriend girls from all over campus, while still having the Stanford residential coed experience. The sorority offered different social and community service activities than her dorm did: It was the best of both worlds.
My mother was also astonished when I called to tell her the news. But after a silence, she said in a voice that could not hide her delight, "She's a Kappa!"
Laura's initiation ceremony was scheduled for sunrise on a Saturday in November. Because the Stanford Kappas have no chapter house, the ceremony would take place at the Kappa house at UC-Berkeley. As a Kappa, my mother was invited to surprise my daughter by attending the initiation and presenting my daughter with her Kappa pin. She was thrilled—especially because she'd never been part of an official initiation herself.
I drove my mother to Berkeley, but as a non-Kappa I couldn't attend any part of the ceremony. The sky was just beginning to lighten when we pulled up to the imposing Kappa house on campus. My mother eased out of the passenger seat, silently waggling her fingers good-bye to me. I watched as she made her way up the steps to the front door. She stood there, uncharacteristically hesitant. Without any apparent movement on her part, the massive wooden door swung slowly inward. Had she rapped some secret code on the door? Uttered some Greek incantation? I peered through the windshield as a beaming young woman in flowing white robes ushered my mother inside. Silently, the heavy door closed behind them, preserving the mystery of this unique bond between my mother and my daughter.
Margaret Leavitt, '75, lives in Carmichael, Calif., and practices water-rights law.
