Introduction

People are talking about friendship again. For the first time in this century it has kindled lively interest, although it engaged imaginations in past centuries, when the noteworthy friends were men. Women as friends were invisible, their friendships maligned. Women friends were heralded once, however, in the nineteenth-century sororal raptures of "romantic friendship." Today, scholars and journalists show women's friendships as positive once again and in many cases even contrast them to poorer relations among men. Canny advertisers now use friendship to pluck at heartstrings and pocketbooks. And filmmakers have seized upon friendship as a theme of regeneration.

This is a heady but confusing time to study women's friendships. As ideals about relationships form, they overshadow actualities and tempt us to treat friendship sentimentally, like other approved, private, and sentimental relationships—modern marriage in par-titular. And other issues cloud the field. Recent attention to friendship grows in part from a resurgent concern with "community." Nostalgia and yearning for community are widespread in politics, popular culture, and social theory. As in past revivals of concern about community, they follow a period of economic transition, ideological and political upheaval, and social experimentation.

The yearning for community as a source of stability, humanity, and unified and harmonious purpose has found expression along the entire political spectrum. On the left—where experiments in elective community once flowered—disillusioned writers now call for a return to older, traditional sites of community; the family ap-

pears to them most accessible for rebuilding. Progressive writers frequently echo those on the right, who focus their idealism about community on the family while disparaging the domain of elective community.

I arrived at my questions about friendship in the charged atmosphere of contemporary concerns about community. We know too little about personal life and community outside the nuclear family, and too little about the sources of persistence and change in family life. If we would revitalize traditional forms of community or build enduring new forms we need to study the wider realm of private life as well as the family. I selected an angle for studying women's friendships—as community and in relation to the family.

My study of contemporary women's friendships and marriages suggests that close friendships are vital and important relationships in women's lives and that they provide unique sources for intimacy, affection, identity, and community. Moreover, women's close friendships are abundant and appear to be even more widespread than marriages. Until very recently, certain that community had disappeared, sociologists have slighted friendship.^[1] Their treatment of the communal realm fixes instead on the family as the crucible of personal integration and community. I bring women's friendships out of the shadow east by the family, examine the culture of friendship and its internal dynamics, and link together women's friendships, families, and social change.

To learn about friendships among "ordinary" women, I selected predominantly working-class and middle-class women rather than members of an elite or representatives of a cultural avant-garde. I wanted to discover patterns that are widespread in contexts affecting most, rather than a few, contemporary women—at a moment when heightened ideals of friendship have not become prevalent. I interviewed twenty-one women; most are married and mothers. Although my sample does not statistically represent a population, it encompasses a variable range of contemporary women.

I asked my respondents plain questions about their friendships and marriages. Because friendship is still for most an unscrutinized institution, the women I interviewed had generally not considered these questions before. They spoke eloquently and with rich detail about the quality and meaning of their close friendships. The result was a fresh and energetic interchange.

My questions are about what characterizes women's close friendships and how they influence women's identities and commitments. I framed my questions as issues of gender stratification and private life. I sought to understand how women's beliefs, ideals, and actions are shaped in their public lives and in their families and close communities. Knowing that marriage and the family are important arenas of identity and motivation for most women, I explored wider personal realms that may condition experience in the family and constitute other sources of women's identity and action. Among these wider realms of private life— such as kinship, friendly sociability, neighboring, and voluntary organizations-close friendship has been least examined.

I analyze women's close friendships as an institution. Within relationships as personal and idiosyncratic as these, what patterns of value and practice justify the term institution? What beliefs, commitments, and positional constraints shape patterns of close friendship and connect close friendship and marriage? What is the correspondence between the ethos of friendship and larger cultural values and social authority? Do women's friendships involve personal and communal values that are believed to lie solely within the family? Do women friends compete with or undermine familial commitments? How does close friendship situate women in marital contests of power and privilege? How does women's place in public life influence their patterns of close friendship? These are the guiding questions of my research.

My study fits topically into the sociology of gender, of the family, and of community. As a sociology of gender, it aims to answer questions about the gender structure of private life, gender differences in modes of affiliation and individuation, and the dynamics of gender conflict in marriage. It views the family from one of its constituent viewpoints and explores "her marriage" and family (to use the phrase by which Jessie Bernard reminds us that marriage is different for men and women). It examines the structures of private life from which women draw resources for resisting gender subordination and forging change.

As a sociology of the family, this work fits into a tradition that examines the family in relation to community.^[2] It challenges views of the family as a self-contained universe of private life—views that assume family life bounds the most significant emotional attach-

ments of adult life and the most important relations of personal integration. It also challenges the belief that the modern family is bereft of communal ties of intimacy and moral authority, that the family and its members are pawns of distant social authority. In this way, the work enters the sociological debate on the meaning of modernity—to revise its underlying consensus on family and community change.

Finally, as a sociology of community, this study begins to reformulate the prevalent concept of community, which defines community by a set of historically specific social forms that are increasingly lost to modern society. In contrast, I identify elements of a more abstract conception of community that can be used to analyze modern social life. I aim to contribute to a sociology of community that encompasses the sites of modern private life that lie outside the family.

Two puzzling feminist issues influenced my approach to the topic. The first was a pattern I noticed in the early seventies among numerous women's "consciousness-raising" groups. In these grassroots groups in the second wave of feminism, women explored the politics of personal life, to develop a feminism that could transform both private and public life. Feminists have often been accused of intentionally undermining marriage and the family. But many consciousness-raising groups that I knew of—including the one I joined—spent the largest portion of their time helping members "work through" intimate heterosexual relationships.

Most of the men in these private relationships did not appreciate being discussed by an organized feminist group. And many relationships broke up in that period (like those of many other young educated women who deferred marriage until their late twenties and thirties). Looking back at these groups, however, I am struck by the strength of their implicit commitment to sustain male-female relationships. After all, our explicit concern was feminist struggle—often defined as uncompromising resistance to gender subordination and the irreducible conflict of interests between men and women. In fact, our explorations of how "the personal is political" were often also a collective effort to improve our individual relations with men we loved. Although we were helping each other to struggle against our men, we were also helping to sustain our commitments. Rarely did individual aspirations—like career

ambitions—or public feminist politics receive the attention that our heterosexual relationships did.

The second puzzle involves the notion that women's networks are "cultures of resistance," a frequent theme in feminist political writing.^[3] In one form or another, its central idea is that associations of women inherently generate resistance to male authority and domination. Yet in instances I knew of, female bonding seemed to generate cultures of accommodation or survival as often as cultures of resistance,

These puzzles directed me toward areas that interweave women's individualism, their commitments to other women, and their commitments to men. This mesh of interests, ideals, and desires seemed the significant place to look for nascent cultures of resistance and for enduring change. I sought to investigate how women's friendships form within the broader context of gender inequality and difference, and how these patterns of friendship articulate with women's other commitments.

I begin with a historical account of the development of companionate marriage and modern women's friendships. Chapter 1 thus provides a historical backdrop for the theoretical and empirical perspectives on contemporary marriage and friendship that I apply in this study. I argue that companionate marriage did not become a last repository of vanquished community but rather evolved intertwined with intimate friendship—twin and symbiotic cultures with a common ethos of "affective individualism." I discuss nineteenth-century romantic friendship as a unique culture of female friendships in this early era of companionate marriage. Romantic friendship provides a historical comparison for the contemporary relation between women's friendship and marriage and allows me to move from past to present, linking theory on the history of family and community with propositions about the contemporary situation.

Chapter 2 presents a broad introduction to my findings. I survey women's testimony on the unique and important aspects of close friendships. Here, women describe intimacy between close friends and how their friendly exchanges affect their marriages.

Chapters 3 and 4 analyze women's close friendships as an institution. Chapter 3 explores patterns of frequency, time, place, and permissible content in the friendships of the women I inter-

viewed—how close friends establish commitment; the rules and expectations women apply to close friendship; and the wide realm of residual customs that gives friendship much of its recognizable form. These patterns reveal hierarchies of obligations and commitments that undergird both marriage and friendship.

Chapter 4 examines the classical link between friendship and individuation. I scrutinize my interviews for clues as to whether individuality and autonomy are engendered and reinforced in women's close friendships; I investigate how ideals of friendship and practices of individuality intersect with women's commitments to marriage and family.

Chapter 5 looks at the active involvement of close friends in each other's marriage. I consider how women friends talk about marriage, with what aims in mind, and to what effect on marriage and on their friendship. I consider the social context shaping women's "marriage work" and the implications of marriage work for power and authority in marriage.

Chapter 6 concludes by drawing together my historical analyses and my contemporary findings in a discussion of women's close friendships as community. Here, I attempt to disentangle a concept of community from classical assumptions that identify communal ties with premodern social forms. And I consider how the friendships I studied manifest elements of community.

Interviewing Women about Friendship

My exploratory aims and interest in friendship directed me to a method that would produce rich detail and adapt to evolving theoretical concerns: a focused interview, malleable enough to follow emergent leads and standardized enough to register strong patterns. Unobtrusive observation or participant observation in private friendships was, of course, impossible. Appendix A details this method of research and the associated problems of inquiry and inference. My interview elicited two kinds of information about friendship and marriage: women's self-descriptions of their friendships and their views on friendship and marriage; and more general information on the formal correspondence between friendship and marriage. To construct analyses of friendship independent of the women's own subjective understandings, I elicited consider-

able information about patterns and practices of friendship and prepared to interpret statements about reasons, needs, beliefs, and desires.

I directed most of my attention to middle- and working-class married, employed mothers, although I interviewed a wider variety of women. Because companionate marriage is a theoretical concern here, I might have focused on urban, educated professional women, the sector with which companionate marriage is most strongly identified in the literature. Yet the recent outpouring of writing on friendship—most of it about women in this stratum—suggests that under the influence of feminism, many of these women are reviving the ideology of romantic friendship; this posed a problem for me. As I explain in chapter l, I believe that romantic friendship has always been more than just stylistic convention; it is rather a self-conscious culture of friendship. Still, like romantic marriage, romantic friendship is a realm where ideal and reality merge easily. I decided to learn about friendship from women who were less likely to idealize it.

Family scholarship since the sixties has amply documented the cross-class diffusion of the ideals of companionate marriage, at least among wives.^[4] Given this evidence of widespread support for companionate ideals, I chose to focus on "average American" women and investigate friendships that should broadly represent contemporary women. (I did interview a few very low-income women. But in slighting their representation in my sample, I acknowledged the structural limitations of my propositions: under conditions of chronic unemployment and poverty and when a modicum of welfare benefits are available, poor single mothers may not find their long-term economic interests in marriage.)^[5]

I focused on mothers for a few reasons. For one, a previous analysis of survey data on friendship suggested that motherhood constricts women's networks of friends considerably more than fatherhood does men's. Because mothers with small networks were unhappier than those with large ones, Claude Fischer and I took those contracted networks to reflect constraints on mothers' ability to conduct friendships rather than their preferences.^[6] I wanted a closer look at that process. In recent decades, 90 percent of American women have married; 95 percent of all married women have expected to have children and, at least up to now, virtually all of

these eventually have.^[7] Thus, most women spend a fair portion of their adult life in that very involving role. I believed that examining women's friendships during a common period of constraint would uncover some of the stronger motives in friendship, and some of the persistent themes of community. In other words, a commonly experienced period of constraint might reveal—along with the particularities of friendship at that specific stage—the values and exchanges in their friendships that women would strive against odds to maintain.

I collected a varied sample of women to interview by contacting associates in various cities, towns, and suburbs in California (see appendix A for sampling details). All but a few of the women agreed to be interviewed. Although not statistically representative, the sample included women of various social classes, ages, races, and stages of life. Before describing this sample by categories, I offer sketches of a few of the women I interviewed. As I do throughout this book, I alter enough facts to preserve confidentiality.

Louise and her family live in a comfortable working-class neighborhood in a small city. She is in the first year of a very close friendship—her first since she and Gary married six years ago. Both Louise and her husband were born nearby, but her high school friendships faded—partly, she says, because her jealous husband discouraged them. Louise met Jan in a night class at the community college; their friendship seems to have added to Louise's growing sense of power in her marriage. School, work, and friendship have all added personal satisfaction as well as marital conflict to Louise's life. She feels that she and Gary are "working it out." He is now cooking meals for the children when Louise works, and he enjoys the company of Jan and her husband, the first couple Louise ever recruited into socializing as couples.

Cass had the help and encouragement of her large close-knit family in throwing out her husband, who beat her and tried to keep her away from her family. Lacking education, she works long hours, often at lonely, home piecework or household work, supporting her children on poverty-level wages. Her own family has provided friendship and support. One sister has always been her favorite confidante, and Cass has had few opportunities and little time to find friendships in other contexts. Cass and her children

live in a very poor, ethnically diverse white neighborhood. Neighbors say hello; but only one has ever been invited into her tiny, impeccably tended home. Cass is reluctant to become friendlier with this one neighbor, who is also a single mother. Although Cass very much likes the woman, she is not eager to care for her children since Cass's own children are older and more independent.

Nancy lives in a comfortable suburban ranch home with her husband and teenage children. She is nearing forty and has worked part-time, off and on, at service jobs accessible to this articulate and personable woman with a high school education. She and her husband lead a very active social life with other couples, many of them friends she and her husband met in children's recreation. Nancy has two very close friends, including a longtime neighbor whom she calls her best friend. Nancy and her husband are also "best friends," and yet she keeps a very large sphere of interests and confidences for her close women friends alone.

Janine, her husband, and young children live in a basement fiat in a deteriorating neighborhood of single-family homes in a small city. Like Janine, most of her neighbors are black. Many are formerly well paid industrial workers, now unemployed by industry shutdowns. Janine was recently laid off a kitchen job at a fist-food restaurant. Her husband is marginally employed; the job that brought them to this city ended when the company closed. Janine is still closest to one of her six sisters, and to the rest of her own family. "We're all friends. When we throw a party, we don't need to invite nobody, because everybody's already there." She also has a good friend in the neighborhood and spends a lot of time with her when their husbands are not at home.

Mary and Hal lead parallel lives. They have raised two children and have remained together through a thirty-year marriage, mostly by going their separate ways. Mary is bitter about her husband's lack of feeling for family, and his preference for his own friends. Hal does skilled industrial work, but Mary professes only the vaguest knowledge of his job of twenty years. For several years Mary has worked full-time at a large insurance company in an office with a stable staff of skilled clericals. She takes great pride and enjoyment in her work, and in sociable relations with her diverse office peers. Her best friend, Vera, is a divorced mother of grown children. The two friends socialize frequently during weekends

and times that most of the other women regard as strictly "family time."

Thea is an urban mother of young teenagers. She is educated, very accomplished in and devoted to her full-time career. Work and family are her most important investments, although she and her husband lead an active upper-middle-class social life. Thea's marriage is the stereotypical companionate marriage; her "friendship" with her husband is still vital after many years of marriage. In recent years she has formed a very ardent friendship with another professional woman who also has strong family bonds. They consistently manage to find time together amid very busy lives.

The employed women in my sample worked in various parts of the "pink-collar ghetto." The household, clerical, service, and "women's professional" jobs (in fields where women dominate and educational requirements far outstrip salaries: teaching, nursing, librarianship, social work) were distributed among the women in a hierarchy of salary, working conditions, and prestige that roughly corresponded to the hierarchy of their husbands' jobs. The husbands' incomes and occupations varied much more than those of the women. Some husbands were low-paid unskilled service workers, others high double-digit professionals. Represented in between were blue-collar skilled workers, white-collar sales workers, small business owners, and corporate administrators. Mirroring patterns in society at large, these men were married to women whose salaries ranged by less than half the spread of their husbands'. The women's salaries constituted just over one-third of their family income, in the cases of the married women who worked full-time, and generally less than one-sixth of the household income, in the cases of those working part-time. Education among the women in my sample was more evenly distributed, because a majority had secured some community college education. Even the very low-income women had high school diplomas; Cass had just been awarded hers after several years of evening school.

Family cultural styles also only roughly corresponded to husbands' occupational status and income. Consumption patterns— evident in dress, household furnishings, organizational membership, and socializing and recreation patterns—were influenced also by wives' education and occupation and, it appeared, by their

friendships as well. For example, Louise, a working-class woman by any standard, has upwardly mobile career aspirations; and her best friend is more prosperous and middle class. In her home, Louise has decorated one room—a living room—with the woodsy hues, nubby textures, and eclectic wall hangings that mark California's contemporary young middle class.

The bulk of my sample fell between stable working class and solid middle class. A few eases each were upper middle class and working and unemployed poor. Predictably, divorced women and black women were disproportionately represented in the latter categories. Since class categories for this sample were complex and particularly unpredictive for the relationships I studied, I use class designations loosely and attempt to specify which elements of stratification appeared to determine the behavior I am describing.

The women I interviewed range in age from early twenties to late fifties. Nearly half are in their thirties. All but two of the twenty-one women are mothers. Fourteen have children at home. Of these, nine have at least one child under six. Mirroring the national rate of employment, half the women with children under six currently do paid work: four work part-time, one full-time (and two others are on layoff or brief leave from full-time work). All six women whose children are older than six work, four women full-time.

Each interview took place in the woman's home and usually lasted two and a half hours. I kept the potentially long-ranging interview as compact as possible, because most women were carving out time for me amid a full day's responsibilities, and nearly half had young children at home with them. They were eager and willing to talk openly and at great length, with only one exception. Penny was a willing participant but said, "I'm the kind of person [who] can't explain myself," We both would have benefited from a longer and less structured exchange; in future exploratory work, I would probably include some multisession interviews.

The interview questions are reproduced in appendix B. Each interview entered a woman's close social world with introductory open-ended questions about self, family, and friends: Tell me a little about yourself. Then I asked for names and descriptions of those people with whom each woman felt most involved and closest. Eventually, I asked specific questions about the conduct and

content of close friendships, probing for their cognitive, affective, and moral orientations. Most questions were open-ended, although often very narrowly focused; a good many invoked short or scaled forced-choice responses.

How should one read my conclusions? If I analyze individual conduct in terms of a group and report incidences of certain behavior among group members, I imply generalization. If a hypothesis generates rich detail, if the subject quickly strikes a resonant chord in a reader, if a theoretical argument is persuasive or uses the terms of a current discourse—then a reader may take an exploratory project as conclusive. I emphasize that I do not generalize the material I have gathered or confirm the propositions it generates or corroborates.

Perhaps the best way to remind a reader that I offer a hypothesis-generating exploratory study is to note its biases and limitations. I do so in appendix A. Assuming the reader is thus prepared, I curb my inclination to use very tentative language and frequent notes of caution. I can use bold interpretation to provoke theoretical refinement and confirmatory replication. As for the data this research method generated, I have presented a great deal—in the form of quotations and response counts—and I have discussed negative cases, so that the reader can judge the conclusions I have drawn. If I am successful, this book should stimulate new thinking and scholarship linking friendship to the social structures of gender.