Another Self: Middle-Class American Women and Their Friends in the Twentieth Century

Chapter 4: “The Staunchness of Female Friendship”: Adult Friends, 1900-1960

4 “The Staunchness of Female Friendship” Adult Friends, 1900–1960 In 1937, a pensive and vulnerable young wife reflected on the disintegration of her marriage and the difficult decision to seek a divorce from her second husband. “My friends have been wonderful,” she wrote in her diary. “And my faith in the staunchness of female friendship has once more expanded. I know—I know how they have helped me.”1 These observations highlight one woman’s recognition of the supportive role of friends in the context of a specific crisis in her life. But they also define a major leitmotif for women’s friendship experiences more generally throughout the first half of the century. As they moved beyond adolescence and college life through the stages of adulthood, many middle-class American women enjoyed the support of loyal female friends across a spectrum of experiences. At the turn of the century, their friendships often resembled those of their nineteenth-century counterparts. Conventional wives and mothers, as well as individuals whose lives followed less traditional paths, might share their deepest personal interests and values with female friends, rely on them for moral support of various kinds and even financial assistance, and maintain close contact over many years. At the same time, intimations of a more casual attitude toward friendship between 1900 and 1920 suggest a contrasting theme that developed further in the succeeding decades. As the new century unfolded, adult women’s friendships would also manifest some generational change in response to the social and cultural trends of the post-1920 period. Yet the accent on change after 1920 was far less pronounced in the case of adult 97 relationships than it was for younger women. While the friendship choices and priorities of adolescents and college students unequivocally mirrored the new emotional culture, particularly the dominant heterosexual imperative, those of women past the stage where dating typically defined the crucial raison d’être exhibited a more textured quality. To some degree, married women’s friendship patterns reflected the influence of the same twentieth-century cultural prescriptions as the relationships of their younger contemporaries. Unlike their predecessors in earlier periods, wives and mothers now perceived a conflict between their family responsibilities and domestic obligations and their relationships with female friends; as a result, the latter assumed a distinctly lower priority . At the same time, however, such women still maintained contact with friends, even when they rarely met, and many eventually acknowledged the importance of these bonds. Generational change can also be discerned in the friendships of single and professional women, but its impact is less clear in these subgroups. Although two discrete periods are apparent in the friendships of younger women between 1900 and 1960, then, the pattern becomes more complex in the case of adult relationships . Here, despite some evidence of generational shifts after 1920, continuity rather than change defines the dominant theme. The category of post-1920 adult women encompasses individuals who came of age in the first two decades of the century—or even earlier, when Victorian culture still prevailed—as well as those who matured after 1920. In her memoirs, Lillian Hellman, born in 1905, alluded to the complexity engendered by this generation gap: By the time I grew up the fight for the emancipation of women, their rights under the law, in the office, in bed, was stale stuff. My generation didn’t think much about the place or the problems of women. . . . (Five or ten years’ difference in age was a greater separation between people in the 1920’s, perhaps because the older generation had gone through the war.) . . . I was too young to be grateful for how much I owed them . . . in the war for equality. As Hellman’s comments imply, the women of her generation grew up with different priorities from those of their predecessors. Even though female friendship remained important to both her peers and their older counterparts, other differences, such as nuances of language, distinguished their relationships. This discrepancy in style highlights a potential source of generational conflict for younger and older women during this period, and it also identifies a source of possible confusion and mis98 “The Staunchness of Female Friendship” understanding for the historian engaged in the task of analyzing change and continuity in women’s friendship experiences. Even for women who were primarily products of Victorian culture, however, friendship did not remain a static experience removed from contemporary...