What’s in it for me? The fascinating history of female friendships
Glance over the “chick-lit” pop-cultural canon and you’ll notice that texts from Clueless to Sex and the City have one thing in common: their glorification of female friendship.
But it wasn’t always like this.
In Ancient Greece, Aristotle explicitly excluded women from his philosophy of friendship, declaring them incapable of the “perfect friendship” that two men could enjoy.
At some point on the historical continuum between Aristotle and the Spice Girls, things shifted.
During the eighteenth century, attitudes toward gender and friendship began to transform.
By the Victorian era, women’s intimate relationships were increasingly romanticized, and scrutinized, establishing a cult of female friendship that continues shaping how we approach relationships today.
Ready to uncover the fascinating story behind the cultural evolution of female friendship?
Then let’s get started.
Women have always had friendships … contrary to male opinion
French essayist Michel de Montaigne captured the sensibilities of his time when he wrote, in his 1580 essay “On Friendship” that women were incapable of this “holy bond of friendship, nor do their souls seem firm enough to withstand the clasp of a knot so lasting and so tightly drawn.
” This rhetoric wasn’t new.
In fact, Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, explicitly excluded women from his highest category of friendship, claiming that, unlike men, they lacked the capacity for intimate platonic friendships.
Women weren’t cut out for friendship.
That was the theory, anyway.
But theory and practice don’t always line up, do they?
While writers and philosophers debated whether women could be friends at all, real women were busy actually being friends in ways far richer than any male critic gave them credit for.
Phillis Wheatley and Obour Tanner forged their friendship in 1770s New England and maintained it over a lifetime of correspondence.
Both had been kidnapped from West Africa and enslaved in America.
In a society that denied their basic humanity, each found in the other an intellectual and spiritual soul mate.
When Wheatley became the first published African American poet, it was Tanner she trusted to gather subscribers for her groundbreaking book.
Their letters are a trove of shared theological debates, discussions about abolition, confidences, complaints, offers of practical help, and emotional support.
Similarly, the writer Mary Wollstonecraft enjoyed such a close friendship with Fanny Blood that when Blood died, Wollstonecraft wore a mourning ring featuring a lock of Blood’s hair for the rest of her life.
Meeting in 1775 when Wollstonecraft was sixteen, she described Blood as “[she] whom I love better than all the world….
To live with this friend is the height of my ambition.
” Their bond became “the ruling passion” of Wollstonecraft’s mind.
The two lived together independently and even cofounded a school – remarkable feats for women at the time.
Women have always been capable of friendship, despite men’s low estimations of them.
Funnily enough, within a few hundred years of Montaigne’s damning essay, men would be starting to worry that women were actually too good at friendship.
Harmless crush or moral panic?
“I have caught the contagion: I have fallen in love,” confessed Mount Holyoke freshman Matilda Calder in 1893.
Her beloved wasn’t a dashing young man, but her female professor.
Half the girls on campus shared her infatuation.
Scandalous?
Far from it.
These girl-on-girl infatuations, known variously as “crushes,” “raves,” “pashes,” or “mashes,” were a celebrated feature of Victorian women’s education.
At elite English boarding schools like Wycombe Abbey in the early 1900s, devotion took tangible form: girls filled their beloved’s hot water bottles, turned down their beds, prepared dried flower gifts, and saved tea biscuits to press into their hands.
American colleges developed their own passionate culture.
Older female students “dated” younger ones, guiding them through campus social life.
Smith sophomore Fanny Garrison described an 1898 dance where a student dressed as a “stunning man” caused “much flirtation.
” Campus newspapers even published anonymous love poems between female students.
The Victorians weren’t exactly open to same-sex relationships, at least not in public.
Why, then, did they condone these crushes that blurred the lines between friendship and romance?
Because well-to-do young women were expected to grow into wives and mothers who would embody the ideal of the “Angel in the House”: moral guardians of the domestic sphere, who embodied the feminine virtues of selflessness, purity, and devotion.
Note the words domestic sphere.
These angels were certainly not expected to have any influence outside the home – and these passionate and devoted girlhood friendships were viewed as a dress rehearsal for the passion and devotion that, as a Victorian wife, a woman would display toward her husband.
Yet feminist Frances Power Cobbe saw something profound in these connections.
In her 1862 essay “Celibacy v.
Marriage,” she celebrated “the blessed power of a woman to make true and tender friendships” as “such as not one man’s heart in a hundred can even imagine.
” While men formed mere “acquaintances” at clubs, women enjoyed “one of the purest of pleasures” in their friendships.
Most radically, Cobbe suggested these bonds could actually liberate women from their expected domestic destiny by providing emotional fulfillment and purpose outside marriage, making a life without husband and children not just bearable but potentially more rewarding.
For Cobbe, the liberatory potential of female friendships was a positive.
The patriarchy disagreed.
As the twentieth century began, society’s view of female friendship transformed from celebration to suspicion.
The emerging field of sexology linked schoolgirl crushes to homosexuality, sparking a moral panic.
Female friendship was fine when society believed that women would naturally relinquish the less significant role of friend for the titles “wife” and “mother” when the time came.
But as the century unfolded, more and more women failed to do so.
Modern girls, modern friendships
Steam billows from manholes, and horse-drawn carriages clatter down cobblestone streets.
In the hectic streets of turn-of-the-century New York, among department store windows and factory whistles, a new figure emerges: the single young woman, alone but determined.
Never before had so many young women been “suddenly released from the protection of the home,” as the sociologist Jane Addams observed in 1913.
They arrived from small towns and distant countries, transforming into factory workers, shopgirls, and stenographers.
In this intimidating metropolis, female friendship provided more than companionship; it ensured survival.
The specter of the “bad female friend” loomed large in public consciousness.
Newspapers eagerly published cautionary tales: the Scottish immigrant working double shifts who abandoned her family after befriending a chorus girl, seduced by the “glitter of the stage.
” Young women arrested for pickpocketing confessed they did it for “the excitement and fun of it,” each claiming to have been corrupted by her wayward companions.
This stereotype persisted because it contained a kernel of truth – research confirms our vulnerability to peer influence across our lifetimes.
Our friendship group can dictate everything from our eating habits to addictions.
Yet while sensational headlines fed panic, a different kind of female friendship was flourishing.
These were practical bonds of solidarity and mutual care.
Working women found in each other the support systems they needed to navigate urban challenges by sharing resources, caregiving, and creating communities amid urban anonymity.
This spirit of female solidarity soon became institutionalized.
Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr established Hull-House in Chicago, where educated middle-class women lived among those they sought to assist.
These “befrienders” declared “Not alms but a friend” to be their motto, believing friendship itself could be a revolutionary tool for social transformation.
This was the birth of a revolutionary ideal: friendship as a path to social transformation.
Solidarity among friends
“Shoulder to shoulder and friend to friend!
” This was the rallying cry of the English suffragettes, who placed friendship at the heart of their revolutionary work.
For these feminists, friendship was the force that transformed individual grievances into collective action.
When suffragette Frances Power Cobbe reflected on her connections to “nearly all the more gifted Englishwomen” of her time, she wasn’t boasting.
She was acknowledging how these relationships energized social reform.
One example: when Lola Maverick Lloyd, a wealthy Texan suffragist and divorced mother of four, first heard Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian peace activist and lecturer, speak in 1914, their instant connection sparked a lifelong alliance.
Lloyd provided financial backing and housing for the impoverished and stateless activist – creating the foundation that allowed Schwimmer’s pioneering international peace work to flourish.
Within the movement, female friendship was a complicating force as much as a unifying one.
Labor activist Mary Harris, also known as “Mother Jones,” criticized middle-class reformers, declaring, “A lady is the last thing on earth I want to be.
” Black activist Ida B.
Wells confronted white suffragist Frances Willard for publishing derogatory depictions of Black men.
Indian independence leader Sarojini Naidu rejected colonial women’s claims of “friendship” as thinly veiled attempts to “interpret, succor and solace our womanhood.
” Decades later, friendship and feminism were still intertwined.
1968 was a turbulent year in a turbulent decade – a year of Vietnam War protests, civil rights demonstrations, and global student uprisings.
At that time, the emergent second-wave feminist movement came to the forefront.
It spread, not only through demonstrations, but through a more intimate network of consciousness-raising groups.
These groups gathered women in intimate circles where they shared personal experiences of discrimination, marriage, and motherhood, discovering that their private struggles reflected systemic oppression.
“The personal is political” became their rallying cry.
These friendships weren’t looked on kindly by the mainstream.
Television shows like the 1972 British program “Scott on .
.
.
the Sex War” mocked feminist meetings as suburban tea parties playing at revolution.
Anti-feminist campaigner Phyllis Schlafly dismissed “women's libbers” as “sharp-tongued, high-pitched, whining” women spreading “seeds of discontent among happy, married women.
” From the suffragists to the second-wavers, these women’s movements revealed an essential truth: friendship, when authentically offered, could be the driving force behind feminist revolution.
Office wives
Melanie Griffiths in shoulder pads in Working Girl.
Diane Keaton climbing the corporate ladder in Baby Boom.
Holly Hunter choosing between career and romance in Broadcast News.
You’d be forgiven for thinking the Hollywood trope of the working girl came into being in the 1980s.
You’d be wrong.
Look at hit movies of the 1930s: Gold Diggers of 1933, where showgirls band together during unemployment; Broadway Bad, featuring women supporting each other in entertainment; and Baby Face, which includes Chico, the stereotypical Black best friend helping Barbara Stanwyck’s character rise from poverty.
Friendship sold then, too.
Why?
The Great Depression made cinemas across the USA and UK affordable escapism.
And, out of changing social norms and financial necessity, more women joined the workforce than ever before.
In 1939, war broke out.
As men shipped off to battle, women filled factories, operated machinery, and worked in rural areas as “land girls.
” These unfamiliar environments forged unexpected friendships across class lines, creating bonds through shared purpose and daily challenges.
Working girls have always had their friendships policed.
In the 1670s, Hannah Woolley’s book The Compleat Servant-Maid advised aspiring young women that, as ideal servants, they should not, as she put it, “keep familiarity with any but those with whom you may improve,” cautioning readers above all to avoid gossip.
The same advice appeared centuries later in Elizabeth MacGibbon’s 1936 book Manners in Business.
Among guidance about things like appearance, which she told her female readers was “your greatest asset,” MacGibbon acknowledged that city life could be lonely.
She saw the appeal of having an office confidante – but warned against it, cautioning that these friendships bred unladylike gossip.
Contrast this with that decade’s other successful advice book, aimed at men, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, which actively encouraged men to cultivate professional connections and friendships.
Carnegie was right, of course.
The shortcut to influence and power runs through friendships, or at least friendly confidences.
While women were cautioned against “gossiping” in the workplace, what’s dismissed as feminine chatter often functions as valuable networking and information-sharing.
Case in point: the whisper networks that warned women which men to avoid, eventually emerging as #MeToo testimonies.
Throughout history, from factory floors to corporate boardrooms, women’s friendships have been both survival mechanisms and revolutionary tools.
The art of neighboring
Picture a medieval village square: women gathering at the well, or spinning together, sharing news over communal tasks.
This wasn’t just socializing – it was a rich tradition of female connection that sustained communities for centuries.
These women attended births together, nursed each other’s sick, and mourned their dead.
In short, they practiced the art of neighboring, building relationships through what sociologists now call “invisible leisure” – meaningful connection woven seamlessly into the fabric of daily life.
Household account books reveal these bonds were cemented through practical exchanges – borrowing kitchen implements, sharing salves, and making gifts of homemade sweets.
While these may not have all been bonds of the BFF variety, these connections served a vital purpose: sustaining community.
Fast forward to the 1960s, when industrialization and mobility fractured once-stable communities.
Sociologist Vance Packard studied corporate wives who relocated constantly, dismissing their quick-forming bonds as superficial “acquaintanceships.
” Yet these women had mastered an adaptive social skill – the ability to rapidly create meaningful connections.
What centuries of female neighboring had accomplished intuitively, science was now beginning to measure.
Epidemiologist Lisa Berkman’s groundbreaking work in 1970s San Francisco revealed a stark pattern: residents of Chinatown, whose community structures resembled those pre-industrial neighborhoods with their tight-knit female support systems, lived longer and healthier lives than the more isolated residents of the Tenderloin district.
Social connection, whether through traditional neighborhood bonds like those of medieval women or the adaptable friendships of mobile suburban wives, directly affects our physical well-being.
Narratives about the “loneliness epidemic” often fuel nostalgia for a mythical past of deep community bonds.
Yet research consistently shows community hasn’t vanished; it has evolved.
A 1990s Coventry study revealed 42 percent of residents actively supported neighbors through emotional distress, while during COVID-19, digital platforms like WhatsApp were mobilized as neighbourhood support networks.
Even friendship’s temporary nature reflects healthy adaptation rather than social decline: Utrecht University researchers found most people naturally refresh 70 percent of their social circles every seven years, suggesting that fluidity, not permanence, may be friendship’s natural state.
From medieval wells to WhatsApp groups, female friendships have consistently tied communities together.
Final summary
In this Blink to Bad Friend by Tiffany Watt Smith, you’ve learned that while female friendship was once dismissed as insignificant, our understanding of this bond has evolved over time.
Whether it is ignored or celebrated in the mainstream, female friendships have always been personal refuges and political forces, surviving despite constant efforts to control and diminish them.
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