Thinking Beyond Science

Friendships aren’t just casual connections—they shape our lives in profound ways. While women often feel closer to their girlfriends than some family members, sharing deep emotions and finding unmatched support, male friendships tend to be less intimate. Guys rarely experience dramatic breakups; they can drift apart for years and still pick up as “close friends.” Studies even show women’s bonds, though more emotionally rich, can be more fragile than men’s.

This contrast isn’t new. Back in classical Athens, philosophers like Aristotle elevated friendship as essential to a good life, outlining three types: utility (based on mutual benefits, like business partners—fleeting once the gain ends), pleasure (enjoying witty company for the fun it brings, equally temporary), and the rare “good” (true virtue-based connection). These ideas set the stage for how societies valued friendships, especially among women.

Medieval Nuns: Sanctuaries of Female Bonds
Through history, women’s friendships evolved from family and neighbor ties—helping with births, illnesses, and daily struggles—to something more expansive. In the Middle Ages, early Christian communities offered a game-changer: nuns living in secluded monastery sections, free from societal constraints. These convents provided rare education, intellectual pursuits, and independence in a world that often sidelined women. Surrounded mostly by other women, nuns formed powerful, lifelong friendships, pouring their energy into these bonds.

Colonial America: Alliances Born of Necessity
Fast-forward to the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when Europe’s colonial push into the New World strained societies. Families emigrated, facing transatlantic upheavals, enslavement, and cultural clashes. Historian Dr. Amanda Herbert, in Female Alliances, highlights how women stitched society together behind the scenes—building colonies, maintaining networks, and sharing resources like medicines and food. Enslaved women, lacking protections, forged ties with diverse others out of survival, obligation, or affection, even shipping supplies from old friends back home.

Yet men monitored these relationships closely, fearing women’s closeness would sideline them in a patriarchal world where women had little power, wealth, or rights. Women’s vulnerability made them targets, but their alliances proved resilient.

Victorian England: The Romantic “Cult of Friendship”
By Victorian times, women’s friendships gained acceptance, even romanticization—a “cult of friendship” where women expressed affection openly, using lover-like language. Sharon Marcus, in Between Women, argues these bonds were central to society, not just appendages to men. “Friend” then meant more than today: confidants, neighbors, or even lovers, distinct from relatives.

Literature encouraged emotional expressiveness. Women called each other “sister,” arranged marriages, and savored platonic love as a middle-class luxury—free from family duties. Diaries from 1830-1880 brim with passionate letters using “love” and physical attraction terms. Queen Victoria’s disbelief in female homosexuality shielded these ties from suspicion. Historians like Carroll Smith-Rosenberg note they complemented family life, fostering loyalty and empathy—traits women were urged to show husbands—while supporting each other through life’s milestones.

Some critics see this as men confining women to a “female world,” but the bonds endured post-marriage.

Modern Echoes and Literary Tributes
These historical threads resonate today. Virginia Woolf’s intense bond with Vita Sackville-West blended passion, intimacy, and steady friendship, inspiring Woolf’s feminist classic Orlando—a shape-shifting poet’s biography spanning centuries, penned as tribute to her friend.

Women’s friendships have always been vital refuges—fragile yet fierce, from convents to colonies to Victorian letters. They challenge the informality of friendship, proving its depth across eras.

Source : Girl Talk: What Science Can Tell Us About Female Friendship by Jacqueline Mroz, Claire Messud (Foreword)

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39089044-girl-talk