Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early Republic by Cassandra A. Good (review)

Scholarship on same-sex friendships and marital friendships in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has shown that Americans saw friendship as playing a crucial role in the new republic, providing intimate companionship and fostering personal virtue that would in turn inspire virtuous behavior in the public sphere. Americans hoped that these horizontal bonds would replace vertical ties of deference and patronage, embodying a more egalitarian mode of interpersonal interaction as befitted a republic. Advice literature and novels depicted male friendships as epitomizing this new mode of personal relationship, though contemporaries also lauded companionate marriages as a version of friendship that could enrich private and public life. But as Cassandra Good's beautifully written and insightful book demonstrates, these were not the only versions of friendship available in the postrevolutionary period.

Good turns our attention to unmarried cross-sex friendships, which were, she argues, "both common and highly valued" in the new nation (1). Like samesex friendships, these often began in early adulthood and lasted for many decades; some friends were of similar age, others from altogether different generations. Friends of the opposite sex provided emotional and practical support that was not necessarily forthcoming from spouses or other relatives. Some of these friendships had a political component as elite women exchanged information and engaged in conversation about public affairs with prominent male figures in the new nation. This enabled women to become active, albeit informal, participants in civic affairs, engaging with men "on relatively equal ground" (188). Indeed, Good claims that these relationships were "truer to the ideals of freedom, choice, virtue, and equality" so cherished by the founding generation "than any other relationships between men and women in this period" (6).

Yet much of Founding Friendships is devoted to the challenges that friends faced as they navigated through the dangers that contemporaries saw in these relationships. Whereas newspapers, magazines, novels, and sermons glorified friendships between men and also marital friendship, they offered little discussion or positive affirmation of unmarried cross-gender friendships. Indeed, writers warned that such friendships were fraught with peril, predicting that men and women who tried to become friends would most likely give way to physical attraction and become lovers. Relationships that might so easily become illicit threatened the very virtue that friendship supposedly promoted.

Because men and women were conditioned to think about licit cross-sex relationships in terms of familial bonds or romance, courtship, and marriage, they had no language with which to express alternative emotional dynamics between men and women. Advice literature generally held that true friendship was based on compatibility, and many authors insisted that men and women were so dissimilar as to make meaningful friendships impossible, unless bound together by romance. Some writers did suggest that nonmarital, cross-gender friendships were more egalitarian than married relationships and also less susceptible to corruption by irrational passions, but more often contemporaries worried that such relationships would be destabilized by the intrusion of passion. Meanwhile, the depiction of companionate marriage as a form of friendship further compromised efforts by cross-sex friends to depict their relationships as distinct from marriage or illicit romance.

Developing mixed-sex friendships was, then, a risky business. Not only might those involved develop inappropriate feelings for each other, but they would most likely become the targets of gossip. As Good points out and as other recent scholars have noted, our modern preoccupation with sexuality sometimes "distracts from understanding what friendship meant to historical individuals" (2). Though some cross-sex friendships presumably did have a sexual component (Good cites as an example the miniature painting of Sarah Goodridge's breasts, contained in a small box and sent by Goodridge as a gift to her close male friend), such relationships were not necessarily romantic or erotic. Yet whereas contemporaries were ready to celebrate same-sex friendships without immediately suspecting that illicit sexual intimacies were taking place, unmarried cross...