It is 1792. Mary Wollstonecraft has just published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a precursor text for a first wave of feminism that will not begin for at least another fifty years.1 Her Vindication is a response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a liberal man of his time who argued that although girls and women should be educated, their education should comprise of subjects appropriate to their social roles — domestic skills, lessons on morality and virtue, and social graces including conversation, music, and dancing.2 A common belief at this time was that if a woman thought too hard — say, about a mathematical or philosophical problem — all the blood in her womb would rush up to her head, causing her to become infertile over time. With some very few exceptions, women were not encouraged or allowed to study academic subjects like math, science, philosophy, economics, etc.

Wollstonecraft uses Rousseau’s own social-roles premise against him, arguing that women should be educated alongside men and in the same subjects so as to become better wives and mothers. Better mothers because they were likely in charge of their male children's educations, as only the wealthiest could afford to hire outside tutors. Better wives because that education would make them better mates and companions in marriage. Wollstonecraft’s retort was possible because marriage itself was undergoing a sea change, with friendship between spouses emerging as a new ideal.

Before this period, marriage was a legal contract for the exchange of women between men, a legal mechanism for joining two kinship systems, a bid to augment the riches and power of both. Marriage contracts are the basis for the ability to own other people, and provide the basis for modern slavery and the expansion of capitalism. But I digress.

So, marriage was an economic arrangement, but it was not for all. Workers, who didn't have wealth to protect or accumulate, simply would not get legally married. Those with wealth to protect did not see the arrangement as emotionally binding. Romantic and sexual fulfillment were frequently sought outside of marriage, and affairs were seen as a natural part of personal growth and social mobility. Children from other men where considered the responsibility (and property) of the woman's husband. Not being able to know or guarantee a child’s paternity was no longer as much of an issue. Only children born outside of wedlock were looked down upon as bastards, as was the unmarried mother.

Marriage gives men ready access to women’s bodies, reproduction through time, and the family entity, under the banner of his surname, becomes a vehicle for accumulation. But anti-establishment revolutionaries and the Romantics3 who championed love, passion, and individual freedom, challenged the hierarchical and economic basis of marriage, giving rise to a novel companionate marriage. By the beginning of the first feminist wave in the 1840s, the ideal of companionate marriage as a union of soulmates, based on affection, companionship, and egalitarianism, had become the standard for measuring relationships across all social classes. The basis for this novel ideal for heterosexual marriage? Women's intimate friendships inspired this new arrangement for a monogamous, heterosexual, reproductive bond. The expectation was now that the couple would be best of friends, and marriage was held up as the highest form of friendship. Arguably, women’s intimate and life-long friendships were eventually absorbed into the institution of marriage.

Remember, at this time women are on the rise, beginning to agitate about education and the vote, and the marriage arrangement in which they have been corralled, after being bought and sold like cattle, is now become a lot more… hospitable and appealing. The idea that in a marriage partner, women could find their everything, their one and only, a friendship superior to any other…. displaced women’s childhood and life-long bonds. Romanticizing marriage as companionate marriage, is it how women were convinced to stay in their places even after it was no longer economically necessary? Recent studies show that men benefit most from marriage still, not women. Is this a dream from which we are just now waking?

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 Let’s take a look at women’s friendships, and let’s keep it in the back of our minds how isolated women are now.

Women’s Intimate Friendships As A Way Of Life

In April of 1981, Michel Foucault gave an interview with the French magazine Gai Pied, entitled “Friendship as a way of life,” where he observes that homosexuality is threatening not as a form of desire, but as a way of life that proceeds from friendship. He points us to the example of intimate friendships between women as documented in Lilian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men (1980):

“There is a book that just came out in the U.S. on the friendship between women. The affection and the passion between women is well documented. In the preface the author states that she began with the idea of unearthing homosexual relationships, but perceived that not only were these relationships not always present but that it was uninteresting whether these relationships could be called ‘homosexual’ or not. And by letting the relationship manifest as it appears in work and gestures, other very essential things also appeared: dense, bright, marvelous loves and affections, or very dark and sad loves.” — Foucault, “Friendship as a way of life”

It is true, for many years following this groundbreaking work the debate centered on whether these intimate friendships were sexual, but as Foucault notes, this is really the least interesting thing about the history of women’s intimate friendships. Sharon Marcus, who updated this scholarship in 2007 with Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, explains how the line between friends and lovers was blurred in part through Faderman’s work. Faderman’s research aligns with Adrienne Rich’s model of the lesbian continuum, the idea that women’s relationships run on a continuum from asexual to sexual.4 Making an important but likely temporary correction, Marcus argues that it is important to look at intimate female friendships as a distinct social bond, not just as a veiled form of lesbianism, or a reaction against male power. We will begin from this assumption, and look at intimate female friendships as a network of relationships that provided women with everything from emotional grounding and support, to knowledge validation and cross-generational knowledge production and transmission. Initially an integral part of the patriarchal, colonial, capitalist family-state system, it comes to be absorbed into other institutions like marriage, and then largely dismantled?

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Victorian era intimate friendships helped to prepare women for the emotional and social labor that lay ahead of them in married life. Characterized by affection, companionship, and equality, friendship is a voluntary relation based on personal affinities. At this time, women are economically bound to men, so their relationships posed no threat to patriarchal institutions. In Between Women, Sharon Marcus shows us how, in Victorian society, friendship was not just a personal connection, but also formed a kind of social network for women, offering a sense of belonging and mutual support. Women’s friendships ran alongside and supported family and community bonds.

The bonds created through female friendships often crossed between generations as well. It was a way to pass knowledge down from one generation to the next — women’s knowledge. Since women did not have direct access to institutional forms of knowledge production, instead they wrote and shared diaries, letters, and personal documents — all kinds of epistolary and ephemeral works. Although we think of diaries and letters and such as private writings, they were not meant to be private but were often read outloud, passed around, and shared and commented on.5

One thing has stayed with me these ten years since first reading this literature: Best friends would write or complete each other’s diaries, or each other’s accounts, as if completing each other’s speech, speaking for each other. Imagine writing your best friend’s account of her life, inhabiting her life to that degree, being trusted to do so, and the intermingling of subjectivities that this implies!

Much of this has been lost, but what survives tells us that women were devoted to each other. Marcus remarks on the romantic language they used, such as recording in their journals how they "fell in love" with other women: Anne Thackeray (later Ritchie) wrote in an 1854 journal entry how she “fell in love with Miss Geraldine Mildmay” at one party and Lady Georgina Fullerton “won [her] heart” at another.6 Although their language is more flowery than what we are used to today, I can see women today making such a remark as a way to pay another woman a compliment.

A cross-generational example is that of seventy-one-year-old Ann Gilbert (1782–1866) who described her friendship with Mrs. Mackintosh as "the gathering of the last ripe figs, here and there, one on the topmost bough!" and used similar imagery in an 1861 poem, asserting that friendship between women was as vital and fertile as biological reproduction.7 Women boasted of making conquests of female friends and openly appreciated each other's physical charms**.8 **They commented on the appearance of new women they met in their journals and letters, just as we might do today.9 All par for the course.

Finally, Marcus introduces the concept of the "play of the system," which refers to the flexibility built into social rules, allowing for some deviation without altering the basic structure. Female friendships provided women with opportunities to engage in behaviors that might otherwise be seen as masculine, such as competition, free unhindered choices, and expressions of strong personal opinions, without being seen as unwomanly. This gender play allowed for the development of bonds that provided women with a sense of freedom and belonging within the strictures of Victorian society. This is in line with my own experiences of women-only spaces, where we see on full display a wide range of personality types and a wide variety of gendered expression.

Legal Recogntion and Institutionalization

There is the family friend who becomes an aunt to the children, and maybe even moves into the household, becoming a part of an extended family structure— this an acknowledgement that close friendships can turn into kinship bonds. This type of kinship bond could also be formalized through the ancient Roman law of adoption that allowed for “family relations to be created artificially.” Family membership was not solely determined by blood ties or heterosexual reproduction. Adoption was a legal fiction that allowed for "factitious extensions of consanguinity."10 Thus, the practice of adoption became a model for forming political communities that were not based on shared blood.

Friendship was a network system, ranging from informal to legally instituted, that held social agreements in place. Women's friendships were the social glue that held it all together. The way that nuclear families are now siloed must be in part due to the deterioration of a network of women’s friendships and the extension of kinship to family friends. Perhaps this gives us some ideas for how social bonds could be reconstituted. If women’s friendship once provided a framework for social kin relationships outside traditional family structures, maybe it could again play that role, as we work to rebuild our sense of community and togetherness.

Marriage is not the only way to legally create kinship bonds. I repeat, reproduction is not the only way to legally create kinship bonds. Maybe “gay marriage” was institutionalized in order to put the lid back on the ways people had been finding to create legal kinship bonds outside of marriage. In this case, Foucault would have been right to remark that it is as a way of life that homosexuality poses its greatest challenge.

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We have seen how with the rise of companionate marriage, friendship came to be considered as the best foundation for marriage, with marriage viewed as the highest form of friendship. Likely, this displaced the role a woman’s best friend played in her friends life once her friend came to be married. Somehow since, a rich network of women’s friendship underlying social bonds has dried up. The details and historical specificities of how, yet to be determined. But what interest me next is investigating how friendship could be the key to building communities of mutual care, to socially secure our mutual aid efforts.

To be continued…

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