Chapter Six
Conclusion: Friendship and Community

Women's close friendships are an institution of personal life in which women find important emotional attachments, distinctive reflections of individual identity, and valued support for familial roles and commitments. In my interviews of twenty-one very different women, I heard accounts of friendships that, with few exceptions, would never fit the mold of emotionally shallow, morally insignificant relations cast by "decline of community" theory. Their friendships were unlike those of nineteenth-century middle-class women, enshrined in a culture of self-conscious romantic conventions. On the contrary, the women I spoke to had rarely even reflected on their friendships. Their statements about the quality and meaning of close friendship surprised them as much as they may have surprised some readers.

The women I interviewed sustained networks of close relationships with kin and friends. Within them, most had formed best friendships with women to whom they felt deeply and uniquely bonded. Women established bonds of best friendship by a mutual self-disclosure and empathy that most found unparalleled even in marriage. Some of the distinctiveness of this exchange lay in the willingness of friends to attend to the inner life and participate in another's emotions. Some of it lay in common experience, which they believed only other women could understand and dignify. Close friendships provided distinctive emotional gratifications, moral and intellectual engagement in critical life issues, and mu-

tuality—values women said only their women friends could provide.

The intimacy and attachment of close friendship form part of the individual integration that is commonly assumed to take place only in family life. My research suggests that even though women do find unrivaled sources of personal integration in marriage and family, they conduct other relations of individuation and identity in intimate friendship. For many women, friends (and, to a lesser extent, women kin) are their primary support for individual aspiration and achievement.

The individuality that is positively recognized—constructed and enhanced—in friendship is a constrained individuality that is rooted in interdependence and communal responsibility. This responsibility applies to friends in the circumscribed obligations of close friendship; but primarily it applies to marriage and family. In several ways women's culture of friendship reinforces family commitments: the most subtle and important is its thorough subordination of the claims of friendship to those of marriage. By ethic and a complex array of practices, women friends make sure that the bonds of friendship never subvert the bonds of marriage. The harmony they sustain between the two spheres of deep attachments far exceeds that typically effected between strong attachments of kinship and nuclear family.

Women friends also devote a great deal of attention to problems of marriage and family—revealing, analyzing and strategizing private family matters. My research showed that best friends often direct their marriage work toward accommodation—women expect close friends to help them work out marriage problems, and the least risky solution is frequently accommodation and acceptance rather than conflictive struggle. As some evidence suggested, however, when a wife's social or marital position makes assertive marital problem solving less threatening, she can draw upon her close friendships as independent centers of emotional and moral support for her resistance or assertion.

I argued that historically, men and women have adapted affective individualism differently because of their differing social positions. I believe this is still true. Studies of men's friendships suggest that they reinforce a more individuated identity. Although they may reinforce marriage commitments, men's friendships em-

ploy very different values and exchanges in friendship. Eschewing self-disclosive intimacy as well as emotion management and marital problem solving, men's close attachments build through sociable camaraderie, task exchanges, and long familiarity. More often originating and taking place outside family contexts, in spheres of individual or nonfamilial collective achievement, they reinforce autonomous identities that are less rooted in the familial than women's are. Men's friendships may well reinforce familial commitment by an exchange of generalized social norms, but the exchange lacks both the explicitness and the power of personalized advice.

The Modernization of Friendship and Marriage

My explorations of women's friendships and marriages provide a view of contemporary family and community that contradicts many scholarly accounts of the decline of community and the evolution of companionate marriage. My research suggests—but does not prove—a view of friendship and family that fits within the perspectives on the modernization of marriage and friendship I outlined in the opening chapter. Let me now situate my findings in that longer view of changes in family and friendship.

Modern friendship and marriage developed intertwined—infused by themes of affective individualism, mutuality, and romance. Nineteenth-century romantic friendships between women thrived because friendship ideals were practicable, whereas romantic companionate marriage was less practicable. As twentieth-century changes accelerated the companionship of men and women, romantic friendships withered. Even so, intimate friendships between women persisted. Indeed, they expanded as affective individualism spread to new sectors of society. In contrast to marriage, the reality of women's friendships outstrips the ideal.

Among contemporary women, friendships—most yet untouched by the sisterhood ideal of feminism—continue to grow in the shadow of the romantic companionate marital ideal. Women still need intimate women friends, and their friendships compensate the imbalance of conjugal ideals and realities. Further, intimate friendships among women provide the unfolding and often-

times unique experience of mutual, empathic, intimate companionship that gives substance to the vision of communication, intimacy, and empathy that women hold for marriage.

The culture of women's friendship continues to nurture the companionate conjugal ideal for the same reasons it has for two centuries—dominant social values enshrine marriage; women need marriage for economic mobility; and the companionate ideal improves women's position in marriage. The romantic companionate marital ideal evolved in the nineteenth-century milieu of growing individualism and gender power difference. The individualism reflected a growing self-consciousness among middle-class women and a recognition that their survival depended on the volition and commitment of men—men who could survive quite well outside marriage. On the one hand, the ideal expressed newly tapped individualistic desires for self-development, emotional expression, and disclosive intimacy. On the other, it propounded a new set of interdependencies between husbands and wives, emphasizing mutual emotion over material dependence.

What may at first appear to be a contradictory stance—supporting an ideal as well as an accommodation to marriages that fall short of it—in fact reveals a consistency with women's interests in marriage. Women espouse an ideal that, if implemented, would improve their power and satisfaction in marriage. At the same time, women reinforce marriages that may represent the best chance of economic survival for them and for their children.

The modern culture of women's friendship took form within a nineteenth-century ideology of domesticity. Now, as then, women friends tend to focus their aspirations on adaptation and achievement in family life. From the eighteenth century until the middle of the twentieth, married women have carried out their friendships almost completely within the boundaries of private life. Since World War II, the increased participation of married women in the workforce has opened a workplace arena for friendships that could in theory emphasize the public (masculine) values of individualism, social achievement, and autonomy. But even workplace friendships still tend to channel women's aspirations back to private life.^[1] In the low wages and scarce opportunities of the female employment ghetto, individual pursuits appear to offer perilous economic risks compared to a stable family life with a higher-earning partner.

Thus the friendships of married working women, like those of single working women of earlier eras, are likely to promote popular marriage ideals, commitments to stable marriages, and familial constraints on individual desires. Viewed in these terms, the accommodative emphasis in women's friendships contradicts neither the ideal of companionate marriage nor a widespread recognition of the gap between ideal and reality.

Beyond giving substance to a vision of marital intimacy, women's close friendships reduce the strain of the contradiction between that vision and the actuality of marriage. Responding to each other's needs for empathy, attended self-expression, and relational identity, women are able to limit their dissatisfaction and the potential risk of asserting these needs in marriage. This marriage work in friendship enabled the women I interviewed to report untroubled feelings about marriages of limited emotional intimacy.

Women's friendships defuse marital conflict in another way as well. Recognizing gender power differences, including women's material interests in marriage, women friends advocate strategies of marital accommodation and subtle influence; they discourage overt conflict and divorce. Even though the companionate ideal evolved as a modern vision of commitment, stability, and regeneration for an unstable marital system, individual attempts to implement the ideal often falter. In many marriages, stability still derives from traditional values of selflessness and duty, economic dependence, and passive emotional attachment. By reinforcing older values, particularly duty to children, women's friendships strengthen commitments in marriage that economic dependence alone might not ensure.

Another contribution friends make to marital adjustment and personal integration is their involvement with each other's children and with each other's identities as mothers. I propose that, like nineteenth-century women who forged an authoritative and dignified culture of motherhood in the social domain to which they were confined, contemporary friends conduct a female culture of motherhood in a domain still essentially their own. Providing this community of parenthood they also ease the strains on marriages that do not give such aid and recognition.

In most family sociology, the companionate ideal-type emphasizes the conjugal relationship as the unique site of "marital adjust-

ment" and "adult personality stabilization."^[2] As I noted previously, sociologists who analyze marital dynamics assume that as the marriage relationship became sentimentalized and emotionally primary, marriage and the family increasingly bounded the emotional lives of both women and men. These writers suggest the decline of kinship and community originally intensified the couple's emotional intimacy, but ultimately it is by its own internal dynamics that marriage comes to encompass the emotional lives of the partners and thus sustain commitment.^[3]

I contend that marriage has never bounded the emotional lives of women. Women developed intimate friendships along with companionate marriages. In these friendships with other women they developed their emotional lives—in some eras, perhaps, more significantly than they did in relationships with men. As the companionate marriage ideal became more popular and more romantic, egalitarian, and empathic, women intensified their emotional investment in marriage. As they did, they relied increasingly on friendships for collaborative emotion management to sustain their emotional balance in marriage and their commitment to it. Thus, women conduct a considerable portion of what family theorists call "personality stabilization" and "marriage adjustment" within close friendships rather than marriage.

Women's friendships do accommodate women to strained marriages. But by serving as repository for marital ideals of reciprocity, emotional communion, and interdependent individuality, they do considerably more than accommodate some women to unequal, emotionally unsatisfying, and identity-submerging marriages. Friends' shared recognition of realities of gender power and their exchange of emotional self-awareness sustain a vision of gender power struggle and a strategic mode of thought about marriage. Writers like Christopher Lasch and Jean Elshtain have viewed such tendencies, as advocated by feminists, as a distorted or pseudo-politics. Yet I maintain that this befriended struggle constitutes a privately conducted politics of gender—not just "antagonism," as Lasch suggests, or manipulativeness and displaced public politics, as Elshtain suggests.^[4]

The discourse that exposes gender inequality and erodes masculine authority has changed from nineteenth-century maternal piety to twentieth-century practical feminism ("I'm no women's lib-

ber, but. . ."). Yet it has kept consideration of the asymmetries of gender alive. At the same time that women friends' efforts to sustain marriage provide an example of time-consuming, energy-depleting women's work that men do not perform, they also create resources for women that men have not cultivated.

Close Friendship as Community

Do women's close friendships form community? If so, what kind of community? To answer these questions, I must begin with a conception of community rather than a knowledge of friendships. Above all, I do not wish to define community by simply summing up the positive dimensions of women's friendships. Doing so would cast this study in the tradition of evolutionary family theory that poses contemporary forms as the end of social evolution. Mine would be yet another cheerful network study that counters assertions of decline of community by asserting that modern sociability equals community. I would rather form a concept that preserves the deeper meanings present in traditional notions of community, a concept abstract enough to encompass as yet unforeseeable social changes that enlarge community. Defining community is difficult, however, even after centuries of exposition on the subject. I can do no more here than identify issues in conceptualizing community and suggest how my findings apply to them.

Most notions of community invoke premodern social organization—pastoral images of village, clan, parish, and neighborhood. Using these images, models of community inevitably emphasize corporateness, locality, permanence, and traditional authority. Claude Fischer condenses these notions into a sociological proposition about the affective and moral bases of community: "The more restricted their choice of associates, the more often and longer individuals must interact with, exchange with, and rely on a small number of people. Thus duration, interaction frequency, and material interdependence lead to communal ties."^[5]

In this kind of communal perspective, dimensions like corporateness and locality have meaning because they limit the choices of community members and assure commitment through dependence. Fischer uses survey data from the 1950s and the 1970s to argue that these assumptions do not apply to modern community.

He concludes that in modem life, constraints that lead to localized, long-term, frequent, and multiplex relationships do not make these relationships intimate. On the contrary, with fewer structural restrictions on association people can choose relationships; their choices promote communal ties.^[6]

Thomas Bender, among others, advances this argument along historical lines, citing an impressive array of historical scholarship that refutes the idealized image of community contained in much social theory. Traditional communities were not as stable, harmonious, intimate, or bountiful as the pastoral image suggests. Bender evokes Tönnies's emphasis on the persistence of community in modem society—of gemeinschaft in gesellschaft.^[7] Theorists like Bender, Fischer, and Barry Wellman develop frameworks for modem forms of community and attempt to disengage a concept of community from traditional relations of corporate authority and constraint. Yet, in loosing the concept of community from these traditional restraints, the authors seem to drop the issue of communal constraint altogether. I think we should rework the component of moral constraint into our revised ideal-type of community.

Moral constraint is an important basis of commitment and the sustained experience of "we-feeling" that all writers identify in community. Shared moral values enable people to identify with and invest themselves in others and thus to build commitment; they deepen and extend relationships beyond self-interest. Moral bonds cognitively anchor emotional ones, steadying otherwise volatile attachments. They socialize relationships between self and social world and encourage people to act collectively. Moral constraint can lead to and strengthen communal resistance to larger authority, a communal attribute that contemporary writing on community must not ignore.

Robert Nisbet is a traditional theorist of community who insists on the importance of moral constraint. He both emphasizes moral authority and ties it to the social structures in which communities are embedded. Differentiating in theory two forms of constraint—social control and the constraint of shared values—he shows how they are tied in practice. Social control (in which a group functions to organize the individual's life and confer status) produces and maintains moral constraint. This is the communal dynamic of the preindustrial family, which determines the social roles its members

will occupy and provides the skills to do so.^[8] Nisbet's logic is undeniable. His premodern examples are too powerful, however, to allow him to imagine how less coercive communal functions might produce moral bonds. Nisbet calls for new forms of community rather than vain attempts to restore traditional forms, but he seems unable to imagine forms of dependence upon morally authoritative community that are not primordial, abject, or involuntary. My research suggests that women's close friendships show how moral constraint is generated in dependence expressed as voluntary mutual reliance on a relation that provides distinctive values. Women friends depend on the empathy and support they uniquely provide each other; they reciprocate and reinforce the moral constraint through their exchange on topics like motherhood and family obligations. The friendship creates a deep sense of meaning and belonging.

Nisbet similarly identifies the important communal attribute of mediating between the self and the society; but he focuses only on how communities mediate between individuals and public institutions. He insists—using the example of preindustrial family—that to be vital, communal structures must function directly in economic or political life.^[9] But I propose that vital communities may also mediate between individuals and the institutions of private life, in the way that friendships mediate between women and their families. These communal functions are manifest to participants and generate moral authority, but their importance is in the realm of private life. Although such communal functions may not satisfy a full-blown ideal of community, they prefigure a more evolved community. Women's friendships hint at how more developed modern communities might evolve.

In spite of my disagreements with Nisbet's interpretation of the dynamics of community, I think his definition of communal relations remains useful:

[They] are characterized by a high degree of personal intimacy, emotional depth, moral commitment, social cohesion, and continuity in time. . .. Community . . . draws its psychological strength from levels of motivation deeper than those of mere volition or interest, and it achieves its fulfillment in a submergence of individual will that is not possible in unions of mere convenience or rational assent.^[10]

How do women's close friendships satisfy this definition? The quality of intimacy and emotional exchange in close friendships easily meets this standard. The ties in each woman's small network of close relations outside the nuclear family are deeply affectionate, psychologically intimate, and emotionally secure. Women's best friendships develop mutual attentiveness and knowledge to an extent probably unparalleled in women's other close relations or in any of men's close ties. In this area of intimacy and attachment, women's best friendships may be exceptionally communal.

Commitment—an investment of self in a relationship—also characterizes close friendship. Women claim a subjective sense of commitment in close friendships, and they often report their beliefs have been confirmed by friends' sacrifices. Moreover, these commitments project continuity in time, and friendships endure separation. Friendships do, however, subordinate their obligations to those of family, which affects their commitments in significant ways. Commitments between women friends include mutable and even terminable bonds. Friends may not be able to sustain commitments if, for example, they have prior commitments to moving with husbands to new jobs. Committed friends understand that each other's ability to share resources of time, shelter, and money may be limited by superseding obligations to family. In traditional community, commitments to church, family, and village were permanent or long-term and fit together in a smoother, ideologically ordered pattern. Contemporary life refutes such permanence and order. And women may be restrained by their economic dependence on marriage from forming commitments that men can form with impunity.

Theories that define community in terms of permanence and locality imply that modern commitments must build over considerable time. But not all communal relations form the same way. My research suggests that the time required to form commitment in women's close friendship is different from that needed to form other commitments. The women I interviewed seemed to be quick to identify potential intimates, willing to disclose themselves to these attractive others, and thus able to attach and commit quickly. Of course it takes time to seal trust; but intimate self-disclosure, one of women's shared standards of commitment, binds friendships

much faster than commitment that builds through long sociable association or the exchange of services (the pattern that studies of men's friendships suggest).

This capacity to form close friendship quickly has several implications. It probably assures women of close communities when they meet potential friends. In my interviews, women never expressed dismay at the prospect of having to find new friends, as they did when considering how they would meet men if they were no longer married. If women generally form close friendships more quickly than men, they can more quickly rebuild their close communities after moves, divorces, and deaths of friends or partners. Women's communal activity is resilient.

Because the intimate exchange of women's friendship satisfies deeply felt needs, including the desire for empathetic understanding—and because women recognize their dependence on friends and on the values of friendship—they experience in friendship a sense of belonging that may be distinctive to women's culture. Their profound reciprocal understanding and their recognition of a need for close relations create moral commitment. The sense of belonging must surely be much more tenuous if friends are loathe to admit such need and dependence. If men friends are both less intimate and less likely to acknowledge dependence, they are probably less likely to sustain the experience of belonging, particularly if time and trouble have not tried their commitment.

Women's close friendships are invested with moral obligations, both to respect individual liberty and to attend to each other's welfare and their children's. Friends' valuation of individual liberty (and also an aversion to conflict, which has other sources) appears to keep the scope of moral authority (if not discourse) narrow in most friendships. Some areas of conduct are subject to moral constraint and some are not. Nonetheless, that constraint applies to areas friends consider most important and that are grounds of common experience.

The area that women friends have significantly opened to moral exchange is childrearing. All of the mothers I interviewed discussed children and childrearing with friends in a way that communicated moral values and influence. This dialogue among women friends who are mothers seems to me to represent an unheralded example of vital community. It is unheralded because

conventional studies focus on the nuclear family as the community of childrearing. Moreover, an intelligent but limited analysis of the penetration of expert authority into family life fails to perceive any process of communal authority able to mediate that influence.^[11]

Writings on the family and social authority do not discuss the networks of exchange on childrearing that this study has discovered. The exchange among friends who are mothers not only solidifies trust and commitment in friendship, it also creates communities of resistance to social authority. Women friends discuss problems, values, and practices of childrearing, recognizing in each other the authoritative knowledge gained from experience that is undervalued and unattended in the larger social organization of honor and prestige. They recognize that childrearing is difficult and complex skill-developing work. They respect the knowledge and integrity of those who sacrifice to do it. And, in this process, they confer authority upon their network community of mother-friends, authority that they draw upon for sustenance and dignity. This exchange is far from impervious to outside influence; and it can, I am sure, serve as a conduit of expert influence.^[*] Even so, outside authority is mediated by a discussion among mothers who recognize the authority of other mothers. They do not constitute a well-defended and unchanging community but one capable of change through dialogue and mutual adjustment.

We can also see evidence of communally generated resistance to authority in the relation between women's friendships and their marriages. Even in friendships in which the values of marriage translate into accommodative marriage work, the dialogue of friendship augments individual capacities for resistance to male authority. Because women friends analyze their relationships and strategize together, they collect knowledge on the dynamics of women's domestic subordination. When they subsequently accommodate, they are likely to do so instrumentally rather than passively—a tactical withdrawal rather than a rout. This process preserves a capacity for resistance that can be drawn on when resistance might succeed. The women's stories of marriage work

illustrate many collectively plotted small resistances, often in the form of power plays for small advantages.

It is easy to imagine friends developing grander strategies to increase domestic power and authority when changing circumstances favor their success or decrease the costs of failure. When marriage represents most women's only opportunity to provide decently for their children, when women's opportunities to establish new heterosexual relationships decrease dramatically with age, when married women friends are powerless to share their material means of survival, the costs of resistance can be high. But when close friends provide support for struggle or provide emotional sustenance that enables emotional withdrawal from marriage, and when friends keep a vision of mutualistic companionate love alive (in ideals and by example), they undermine male domestic authority—even when they cannot radically erode men's power.

I do not wish to overstate the capacity for resistance to larger authority implicit in women's personal communities. Personal communities are not social movements. Women's friendships concentrate in private life and have their greatest communal impact there. Women have been excluded politically and economically from public life, and their ability to participate in public associations is limited by their domestic responsibilities. So, although friendships provide chains of recruitment into public life,^[*] we would have to see a lifting of constraints on participation (in the form of child care, greater sharing of domestic responsibility) before a strong civil orientation occupies the dialogue of women friends. Men, who are freer to participate in public life, may be more oriented to public issues in their friendships.

What kind of community inheres in women's close friendships? Women's friendships create personal community—elective, essentially dyadic, intimate, oriented to mutual self-development and individual needs, and concentrating on the activities of personal life. Yet the benefits of women friends' community extend beyond

pairs of friends. Women's friendships influence their family lives, absorbing and transmuting tensions that originate in marriage and parenthood, recreating commitment, helping to effect change. They function very much like the "intermediate institutions" that theorists of community see mediating between the individual (or family) and larger social authority.

A woman's friendships mediate between the individual and her family, serving both her personal integration and the integration of her commitments to friends, kin, and family. Just as Nisbet's pre-industrial family manifestly served individuals in the larger society and in doing so created legitimacy for its authority, women's friendships manifestly serve women in the family. And in their evident importance, women's friendships also generate authority. The distinctive communal content of women's close friendships lies in their contribution to individual identity and needs and to women's family responsibilities. Through these valued exchanges, moral commitment and constraint evolve.

Most writers on modem community—both pro and con—agree that traditional community is gone and cannot be restored amid individualism, centralized authority, geographic mobility, and family privatization. Women's friendships contain elements of community not captured either by antimodernist sociological images of traditional community or by modernists' narrower images of community as intimacy or sociability. Beyond providing the bonds of psychological intimacy, women's close friendships forge, exchange, and preserve moral values that contradict rationalized, impersonal, instrumental, and individualistic values in the dominant culture. The structures of authority inherent in personal communities of women are difficult to delineate because they are informal and fluid. Personal communities of friends are generally loose networks of pairs and are therefore less cohesive and more subject to the idiosyncrasies of "dyadic withdrawal."^[12] Nonetheless, women's personal communities generate authority that inheres in the unique and important contributions friends make—to satisfy needs generated by social structures that friendships both accommodate and resist.

The moral framework of modem women's friendships is radically different from that of traditional community. Friendships value voluntarism, mutability, and fluidity, which render their influence

less absolute, more assailable, less punitively constraining, more (fallibly) porous and negotiable, and less directly and serviceably political than those of traditional community. In contrast, modern women's personal communities bind individuals without submerging individuality; sustain and reconstruct loyalty by a substantive rationality of befriended decision-making; and remain resilient and evolutionary by adapting to conditions of necessity while preserving transformative ideals and relations. They synthesize old values and new.

I do not intend to suggest that contemporary women's friendships offer a sufficient model of elective community. They are very loose networks of pairs and they contain many distorted reflections of women's powerlessness. Still, the quest for a vision of community whose benefits are ample and justly distributed requires a move beyond both premodern and extreme individualist conceptions. Contemporary women's friendships may suggest the makings of such a modern communal ideal.

Toward a More Inclusive Study of Women's Friendships

There is much more we need to know about friendships before we can evaluate them as community. My interviews with married women suggest that close friendships tend to buttress marriages and women's commitments to them. My few interviews with divorced women suggest that close friends labored to shore up their marriages until the divorce decision; then friends provided the emotional support and material aid (mostly child care) that helped them sustain lives outside marriage. Further study will have to examine whether and how married friends help women live through and work through divorce. What kinds of community do close friends provide divorced women, who now include the vastly increasing numbers of divorced women rearing children? How do friendships respond to the economic and emotional setbacks of divorce and to the asymmetries that such change introduces into friendship?

Future studies should also consider the friendships of single women, as the rate of single households among women increases and as more women defer marriage. Single women also balance

commitments between close women friends and romantic attachments. Do their "rules of relevance" differ from married women's? Do they effect the same harmony between the two spheres of attachment? Do they exchange different kinds of support? My interviews with women not married and with wives talking about their single days suggest that single close friends have more rights to request a friend's time, shelter, and money and to criticize boyfriends and advise conflictive struggle. They also suggest more competition and bad feeling between the two spheres of commitment.

Interviews with single lesbians and women in lesbian couples would add a dimension absent from this research. Some intentional lesbian communities place strong moral emphasis on friendship.^[13] Among these intentional, self-conscious communities of friends or among groups of feminists who have revived romantic friendship, we might learn how the cultural recognition of friendship's community affects that community. Studying lesbian friends would also let us separate issues of gender power and conflict from other issues of power and conflict in personal life. Thus, it would be an important viewpoint on gender stratification, as men's friendships would be.

Close friendships are only one kind of friendship. Sociable friendships, co-participation in organizations, and workplace collegiality all have benefits worth examining. I mention them here to evoke a wider picture of community and to remind the reader that the relations I have been describing are not women's friendships in general, but relations with best friends and others to whom women feel closest. Yet intimacy may be an overemphasized element of community. Intimacy creates burdens as well as blessings. The stresses that accompany emotional dependence and support may fray the looser bounds of modern community.^[14] Other kinds of friendship may be more stabilizing or more satisfying in certain ways. The more distanced relations of sociability and civility may play more important roles in individual well-being and communal evolution than most modern conceptions of community suggest.^[15]

Further studies of friendship and community should look more closely at the effects of the social roles women are increasingly undertaking, such as full-time jobs and careers, and political participation. Immersion in a career may inhibit the exchanges charac-

teristic of the female friendships I identified. Such structures may affect patterns of friendship regardless of women's felt needs for intimacy and attachment. Lucrative and absorbing careers of the sort that still occupy few women today may shift resources in marriage and emphases in friendship. (Professional women who read this study commented that their close friendships are not as accommodation-oriented as those of the less occupationally privileged women I interviewed.) Political participation might introduce more civil issues into the conversation of friends. It might also expand, diversify, and loosen networks in ways that influence friendship practices. I interviewed a number of employed women (most of them in jobs rather than careers); but I mention them in this call for further research to remind the reader once again that hypotheses generated in exploratory research must be subjected to more conclusive methods. Such scholarship may contribute to an increasing recognition among women of the meaning of their close friendships. And this recognition may itself strengthen community among friends.

I have not answered two questions about friendship and marriage that people take great interest in: do differences in friendship and intimacy between men and women derive from gender differences in personality? can husbands and wives become each other's best friends? Although my study cannot answer whether or not gender differences in intimacy reflect deep differences in personality, I have found it worth exploring structural sources of differences that appear to be rooted in personality. Position in society and family may provide clues as to why certain intimacies like attentiveness and empathy, for example, may be preferred and practiced by some more than others—why they may be structured preferences rather than differential capacities. Nonetheless, my findings on women's friendships, and others on men's friendships, leave plenty of room for proposing deep gender personality differences that shape intimacy.

On the question of whether men and women can become each other's best friends, I am certain that some readers have already drawn pessimistic conclusions. And some may have taken this study as evidence that best friendships impede women's efforts to establish marital intimacy. Must we dim widespread hopes that men and women can struggle toward emotional intimacy and mu-

tuality? My research offers no such implication. The women I interviewed often seemed to use intimate friendship to avoid the effort, disappointment, or risk involved in struggle in this area; nothing in my interviews indicates that a more direct strategy could not work. The women I interviewed generally did not see their limited marital intimacy as a major problem. Their reliance on best friends for certain kinds of intimacy tells us little about the chances of success for those women who do consider increased intimacy in marriage worth struggling for. Of those women who had tried to deepen marital intimacy or who had considered doing so, most believed their friends had helped them. Their belief does suggest that women's best friendships may further rather than impede such an effort; but nothing in my data indicates whether the effort can work. If there are reasons for pessimism over achieving contemporary companionate ideals of marriage, they will have to be drawn from a study of people who have actively pursued these ideals.^[16] Good structural analyses should clarify patterns of accommodation without prescribing hopelessness.

I conclude that close friendship deserves recognition as a vital institution of private life. Women's close friendships are mutualistic, intimate, durable, and committed. They enmesh women in significant relations of individuation and community. They provide distinctive sources of interdependent individual identity and support for family commitment. If it is true that women have developed a form of community that men have not, then women may have accumulated resources to use with men in their struggles toward dignity, mutuality, and equality in marriage.

And yet sources of personal strength do not translate into significant social change without material or ideological means of organization. Mary Ryan, analyzing how nineteenth-century women translated sisterhood into public influence, commented on the paradoxical impact of effort that cemented women's domesticity as it manifested women's public power. Acting on their perceived interests as mothers, women organized to shape family values and public practices in ways that enforced the division between men's public roles and women's private ones. For Ryan, nineteenth-century sorority raises questions as to "whether women's cultural and female networks, which continue to be rooted largely in the relations

of housewives and mothers, can generate much more than reflexive and defensive, rather than critical, responses to social and familial change.TM My work appears to raise the same issue: autonomous networks of best friendships also seem to enforce marital accommodation. However, I believe our answer to this issue does not depend on whether the bonds among women exist in public or private networks. Feminists are realizing that they can and must organize women as wives and mothers, and they are reaching for a politics that bridges the gulf between private and public structures. How women use their networks depends not so much on their content per se as on the correspondence between women's public and private experience, and on the political, economic, and ideological resources available to women. It is from among them that women can gather resources and visions of change. Women's networks foster accommodation, survival, and resistance—the balance is struck in negotiations involving public experience as well as private life.