It’s not just jobs and men. As more things become available to more women, whether those things are luxuries like travel or nice homes, or too-scarce necessities like education or reliable childcare, the variety of things that women may find to resent about their lots, compared to the lots of their female peers, has only expanded.
Ann and Amina have developed what they call “Shine Theory,” as an attempt to redress the now-entrenched model of women as meowing competitors. “When we meet other women who seem happier, more successful, and more confident than we are, it’s all too easy to hate them for it,” Ann has written, because we understand it to mean that “There’s less for us.” The solution, she advises, is, “when you meet a woman who is intimidatingly witty, stylish, beautiful, and professionally accomplished, befriend her. Surrounding yourself with the best people doesn’t make you look worse by comparison. It makes you look better.”
Marital Rifts
Before the Skyping and texting and shared Tumblring that provide today’s female friends their expressive channels, there were letters. In fact, epistolary communications provide the skeleton of much of what we know not only about specific friendships between women and also about the circumstances and perspectives of women whose lives might otherwise have slipped out of public view. They also offer us one of the best windows we have on how women have viewed their marriages and their friendships, and the struggle to make space for both.
A faithful and prolific correspondent, Jane Eyre novelist Charlotte Brontë accepted the proposal of her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, whom she did not love, when she was thirty-eight. She understood that marrying Bell would, as she wrote to a friend, secure her father “good aid in his old age.” In this admission and others, Brontë was frank with her female confidantes.
“What I taste of happiness is of the soberest order,” Brontë wrote to one friend in 1854, of her decision to marry. “My destiny will not be brilliant, certainly, but Mr. Nicholls is conscientious, affectionate, pure in heart and life . . . I am very grateful to him.” She went on, in another missive, to explain that her betrothal had cemented many previous suspicions about marriage. “I know more of the realities of life than I once did,” wrote Brontë. “I think many false ideas are propagated . . . those married women who indiscriminately urge their acquaintances to marry [are] much to blame. For my part I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance—what I always said in theory—Wait.”
It was clear that Brontë felt the loss of freedom palpably after her marriage. “[T]he fact is my time is not my own now;” she wrote. “Somebody else wants a good portion of it—and says we must do so and so. We do ‘so and so’ accordingly, and it generally seems the right thing—only I sometimes wish that I could have written the letter as well as taken the walk.”
Several weeks later, Brontë wrote to her best friend, Ellen (Nell) Nussey, that her husband “has just been glancing over this note—He thinks I have written too freely . . . I’m sure I don’t think I have said anything rash—however you must burn [triple underlined] it when read. Arthur says such letters as mine . . . are dangerous as Lucifer matches—so be sure to follow a recommendation he has just given [to] ‘fire them’—or ‘there will be no more.’ . . . I can’t help laughing—this seems to me so funny, Arthur however says he is quite serious and looks it, I assure you—he is bending over the desk with his eyes full of concern.”
That concern only became fiercer as the weeks went on. “Dear Ellen,” Brontë wrote a week later, “Arthur complains that you do not distinctly promise to burn my letters . . . He says you must give him a plain pledge to that effect—or he will read every line I write and elect himself censor of our correspondence. . . . You must give the promise—I believe—at least he says so, with his best regards—or else you will get such notes as he writes . . . plain, brief statements of facts without the adornment of a single flourish.”
Nussey finally responded to Brontë’s husband, “My dear Mr. Nicholls, As you seem to hold in great horror the ardentia verba [burning words] of feminine epistles, I pledge myself to the destruction of Charlotte’s ‘epistles’ henceforth, if You pledge yourself to no censorship in the matter communicated.”
Nicholls agreed. Nussey, much to her personal credit and to history’s benefit, never burned the letters. Less than a year later, Brontë, who had written to Nussey that “it is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife,” became an embodiment of one of the literal perils of wifeliness; she died, likely while pregnant, at thirty-eight.12
Marriage, in one manner or another, can have a deleterious impact on female friendship.
Sarah Steadman is a twenty-nine-year-old middle-school teacher in Vernal, Utah. She spoke of her mixed feelings at having seen so many of her friends, especially in early-marrying Utah, where those who share her Mormon faith wed early, driving the state’s marriage age as low as anywhere in the nation. When Sarah’s best friend from high school married in her early twenties, Sarah was happy for her. “I loved the guy,” she said. “I had actually set them up.” And yet, she said, “it was kind of devastating. I felt like I had lost her in my life, even though we’re still good friends. It’s never the same way that it was, completely, because they have their new life.”
One of the most gutting moments of my thirty-third year came during the period in which two of my dearest, most beloved friends were getting married months apart. At one of the events to celebrate them, I was passed a message book in which I espied one of my best friends writing to the other about how grateful she was that they were “taking this step together.” When I saw it, I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach.
We were all friends together, a triad, equals. We had varied careers, ambitions, styles, impulses, sexual tastes. It was true that both of these women happened to be getting married and I happened to be single, but I hadn’t, until that moment, conceived of their experiences as particularly parallel; their relationships were so different, their partners so different, even their weddings different. But this expression made me see the world in a new way. I may have still been their age, their confidant, their social peer, their neighbor, their friend, but here was an evocation of a shared step that perhaps they saw—and I suddenly felt—as a step away from me.
Elliott Holt is a novelist who lives in Washington, D.C.; she has two sisters, went to an all-girls school, and describes herself as one of those women whose most intimate relationships have been with other women. When she was in her twenties, she recalled to me, she and her friends often saw each other several times a week; they hung out and talked deep into the night. By the time they were in their thirties, some of her closest compatriots had begun to peel off into couples, saving to buy apartments and have children; they stopped going out as much. Now that she’s forty, and nearly all of her closest girlfriends have partners and children, she said, she is lucky to catch up with them every three or four months. “I feel completely out of sync with my peers,” Elliott said, “And I love them so much!”
As the only single woman in her social circle, Elliott said, “I always joke that I feel like a foreign exchange student: I do speak the language: I have nieces; I’ve been in people’s weddings! But I’m kind of shut out.” Her married friends used to invite her to social events but, eventually, she said, the invitations dwindled. She assumes that this is because her friends realized that all they talked about were kids and husbands and houses, and that they didn’t want to subject her to it. But what they don’t understand, she thinks, “is that I’m trying to figure out where the community is where I do belong. It’s tricky to confess you’re not sure where you fit without sounding like you’re whining about not having a partner.”
Elliott recently spoke to an ex-boyfriend who told her that she needed to make friends who were in their twenties or their seventies. And she’s tried. On a work visit to New York she met a group of young women who invited her out with them. She had a nice time, until, she re
called, “at eleven-thirty, they said they were going to head somewhere else and I had the sense that the night was just starting, and was going to end at two in the morning.” Elliott felt the decade and a half that separated them keenly. “I was born when Nixon was president,” she said. “And they’d go out and take smoke breaks and I thought, ‘Oh my god, you guys smoke! My friends all quit at twenty-nine!’ I had a drink and a half, but I was tired and out of sorts.” Elliott went home.
Sara, Again
Six months after she moved to Boston, Sara came back.
She came back for many reasons and after an enormous amount of difficult decision making. She came back because the relationship she’d traveled to Boston for wasn’t fulfilling. More importantly, she came back for the very reason my Eeyoreish friend had predicted: that the life she’d left in New York—her work, her city, her friends—was fulfilling. She came back for herself.
It was remarkable. I was sad that her relationship hadn’t worked out, but happy that she had built a life on her own that was satisfying and welcoming enough to provide her with an appealing alternative to it. And I was thrilled to have her back.
But spaces can creep up between friends just as easily as they do in marriages; gaps yawn open just as they do with lovers. Sara and I were still close; we still talked and drank and watched awards shows and traveled together. But maybe because she was nursing painful wounds as she rebuilt her New York life, and was resistant to simply falling back into her old patterns; maybe because, after the pain of having to say good-bye, I was gun-shy about giving myself over so completely, our friendship was never again quite as easy, quite as effortless as it had once been.
Then, a couple of years after her return, it was I who fell in love. It was I who suddenly couldn’t go out multiple nights a week with my girlfriends, because I had met a man with whom—for the first time in my life—I wanted to spend my nights.
We have no good blueprint for how to integrate the contemporary intimacies of female friendship and of marriage into one life. In this one small (but not insignificant) way, I think nineteenth-century women lucky, with their largely sucky marriages and segregation into a subjugated and repressed gender caste. They had it easier on this one front: They could maintain an allegiance to their female friends, because there was a much smaller chance that their husband was going to play a competitively absorbing role in their emotional and intellectual lives. (Though, admittedly, as Charlotte Brontë and Nell Nussey demonstrate, even a loveless marriage could put a crimp in communicative freedoms).
When I met Darius and fell in love with him, I was stunned by how much time I wanted to spend with him, and also by the impossibility of living my social life as I had before. I could not drink beer at the end of most workdays with Sara or eat dinner every other night with my friend Geraldine; I could not spend my weekends hashing over everything that had happened that week with my cousin Katie. I couldn’t do those things because, if I had, I wouldn’t have been spending most of my time with this wonderful guy who, in a remarkable turn of events, I also wanted to have sex with. And once I took out the constancy of communication with my friends, the dailyness and all-knowingness, the same-boatness, the primacy of our bonds began to dissipate.
The worrywarts of the early twentieth century may have been right about the competitive draw of female friendship, about the possibility it might inhibit or restrain a desire for marriage, especially bad marriages. But the real problem with having friendships that are so fulfilling that you prefer them to subpar sexual affiliations is that when you actually meet someone you like enough to clear the high bar your friendships have set, the chances are good that you’re going to really like him or her. That’s what happened to me.
It’s not that I loved my friends any less. They are still my friends; I love them and I miss the everydayness of what we used to have. I feel guilty, but here was the truth, for me: I couldn’t maintain the level of immersion in my friendships and immersion in what was to become my marriage, because I had been, in many senses, very happily married to my friends.
There has not yet been any satisfying way to recognize the role that we play for each other, especially now, as so many millions of us stay unmarried for more years. Because whether through our whole lives, or through decades at the beginning of them—and, often, at the end of them, after divorces or deaths—it’s our friends who move us into new homes, friends with whom we buy and care for pets, friends with whom we mourn death and experience illness, friends alongside whom some of us may raise children and see them into adulthood. There aren’t any ceremonies to make this official. There aren’t weddings; there aren’t health benefits or domestic partnerships or familial recognition.
And when those friendships change—when one friend moves or marries or dies—there aren’t divorce settlements, there aren’t specially trained therapists, there isn’t alimony; there’s not even a section in the greeting-card aisle to help us navigate it.
That’s what makes the stories that women tell about their friendships—in letters to each other, in novels, and now on television shows and in movies—so powerful. It’s part of what I loved about Jane Eyre, in which Jane’s friendship with the consumptive and ill-fated Helen Burns saves her from boarding school solitude, about Anne Shirley, who finds her “bosom friend” and “kindred spirit” in schoolmate Diana Barry, and announces in her youth, “Diana and I are thinking seriously of promising each other that we will never marry but be nice old maids and live together forever.”
Popular culture offers us visions of female friendship, and also, simply, of single women who can keep us company and perform a public, performed version of the thing that flesh-and-blood friends have done: reassure unmarried women that their lives are real and full and worth telling stories about.
That Girl in Popular Culture
In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown, a forty-year-old Arkansas native who had worked her way up as an advertising copywriter and was certainly not a member of what would soon become the women’s movement, published a blockbuster book. The slightly trashy paperback had none of the heft of The Feminine Mystique, which would be published the next year, but it addressed a constituency that Friedan would barely acknowledge. It was called Sex and the Single Girl and was a frank guide for unmarried, sexually adventurous women. It presumed that single women were motivated largely by their hunt for husbands, but, Gurley Brown believed, they should be having fun and feeling good about themselves along the way.
“If you can forget the stultifying concept that there are appropriate years for certain endeavors (like getting married) and appropriate days for being gay and merry (like Saturday nights) and use these times without embarrassment or self-pity to do something creative and constructive . . . I believe half your single girl battle is over,” Brown wrote. She called the single years “very precious . . . because that’s when you have the time and personal freedom for adventure” and took a rather pragmatic view of marriage, which she called “insurance for the worst years of your life.”
The book caused a stir in the mainstream media. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who would go on to co-found Ms. Magazine with Gloria Steinem, was, in the early sixties, a publishing publicity executive in charge of promoting Sex and the Single Girl. She told me of first reading the manuscript and thinking, “This is fantastic; this is my life.”
Other books were beginning to present stories about what twentieth-century female life, unhooked from marriage, might look like. Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything (1958) was a sturm-und-drang yarn about unmarried girls in clerical jobs, while Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963), was about more privileged young women, also grappling with sex, birth control, lesbianism, rape, work, and friendship. Norman Mailer would diss The Group by sneering at its author—in the style of men put out by powerful women of every era, apparently—that she was “a duncey broad . . . in danger of ending up absurd, an old-maid collector of Manx cats.”13 (McCarthy was, in fact, four times married.)
In 1966, a twenty-nine-year-old actress, Marlo Thomas, daughter of Hollywood comedian Danny Thomas, was trying to land a sitcom vehicle. Frustrated by anodyne scripts, Thomas would later recall, she asked a group of executives, “Have you ever thought about doing a show about a young woman who is the focus of the story? As opposed to being the daughter of somebody or the wife of somebody or the secretary of somebody? About her dreams, about something that she wants out of life?”14 According to Thomas, the executive responded, “Do you think anybody would be interested in a show like that?” Thomas gave him a copy of The Feminine Mystique and soon after, ABC green-lighted a half-hour television program (produced by Thomas) about Ann Marie, an unmarried actress with an apartment of her own. Thomas originally wanted to title the series Miss Independence, but producers dubbed it That Girl.
Thomas, who would become active in the women’s movement, was so driven to keep her peppy confection focused on a woman living on her own terms and not alongside a husband that, when ABC wanted to renew That Girl, Thomas declined. She felt that Ann, whose relationship with boyfriend Donald appeared unconsummated, was no longer a realistic representation of how American women were living. When executives wanted to end the series’ five-year run with Ann and Donald’s wedding, Thomas again balked: She did not want to send a message that women’s stories always lead to marriage. Instead, That Girl’s 1971 finale was about the couple getting trapped in an elevator on the way to a women’s liberation meeting.
All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation Page 14