Collegiate Times

Burruss Hall Auditorium was a sea of pastel-lettered sweatshirts on Sunday as the Panhellenic Council hosted speaker Rosalind Wiseman, author of "Queen Bees and Wannabes," the book that inspired the film "Mean Girls," as a kickoff event for Sisterhood Week, a campaign for national hazing prevention within sororities.

Audience members praised Wiseman's insight into that which she calls "Girl World."

"She's just a really fun and energetic speaker to listen to," said Jackie Holt, a Delta Gamma senior who saw Wiseman speak at her sorority's national convention two summers ago. "She has a great message, and I think we can all relate to her as a chapter."

Amid the fielding of various topics that haunt the minds of college girls everywhere, from getting back the designer jeans you let your roommate borrow two weeks ago to the rules of hooking up with friends' exes, what Wisemanwanted audience members to take with them was that sisterhood ultimately means learning how to survive conflict together.

"You won't ever know who your true friends are until you go through and survive conflict," Wiseman said. "It truly strengthens a relationship when you work through a conflict together successfully."

This idea was exactly what Panhellenic had in mind when they invited Wiseman to kick off Sisterhood Week.

"We really wanted girls to be able to take positive conflict resolution skills from the event in order to strengthen not only their relationships, but also their leadership abilities," said Lindsey Hammond, vice president of programming for Panhellenic. "We want them to realize that the social hierarchy is something we all deal with and that they have the ability to challenge that to ensure that they are treated with dignity."

Wiseman began learning about how girls operate when she started teaching high school girls self-defense classes in Washington, D.C.

"I learned that I needed to start earlier than teaching them self-defense in order to find the root causes," Wiseman said. "So I went from that to teaching in classrooms and just talking to students. I just kept listening to them and learning from them."

Wiseman's dedication to understanding female conflict extends beyond just penning novels. In 1992, she founded the Empower Program, a national program dedicated to empowering young people to stop violence. She also wrote a follow-up to her first novel, titled "Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads."

Wiseman also invented the concept of the "SEAL" method to help young people learn to communicate effectively in a conflict. The acronym outlines a four-step method for successful conflict-resolution: 1) Stop to think about how to confront the person, 2) Explain exactly what needs to be said, 3) Affirm and acknowledge the other's feelings and thoughts on the matter, and 4) "Lock in or lock out" - learn that sometimes you can't work through the conflict.

"It doesn't matter if people are friends with each other in the end or not. What really matters is that you are taken seriously as a person," Wiseman said. "This is what the SEAL method does."

Wiseman challenged attendees to confront social hierarchies, to look carefully at group traditions and to be unafraid to question those traditions that should be disputed, even if it goes against the ideas of the rest of the group. She emphasized that being able to do so is the key to becoming a mature adult woman capable of leadership.

"Be mindful about what kind of women you truly are, besides the words in your mottos or creeds," Wiseman said.

She added jokingly, "And please, ladies, if you want to be taken seriously as a woman, no more sneezing like a kitten."