Historical female friendship fact: In the 1800s if you had a huge friend crush on a
girl, it was called a smash.
To kick-off this very brief history of female friendship/bff/besties/gal pals/girlfriends,
lets hop, skip back in time to the 17 and 18 hundreds. For men and women alike this
was the heyday of the romantic friendship, platonic same-sex friendships that were both
physically very intimate and also emotionally very passionate. Dearest Prudence my love
for thee is like the rain falling on speckled trees and dogwoods in the spring. Friends
would write love letters to each other, Victorian women would sometimes have fake weddings to
marry their best friend, at women's colleges it was common for some women to cross-dress
and go as men to their school dances because actual men weren't allowed at dances until
the 1920s. Girls were actually encouraged to develop these romantic friendships. Their
parents thought that it would be good experience for them for marriage and learning how to
take care of a spouse. But in 1892 the highly publicized murder of a young woman named Freda
Ward by her lover Alice Mitchell started to raise people's eyebrows about the appropriateness
of these extremely close friendships that were sometimes sexual between women. By the
end of the 1920s we have American psychoanalysts warning of how quote, 'One of the most common
perversions of the libido is the tendency of teenage girls to affix their affections
on members of the same sex.' Bee's knees, oodelalee, boot-legged gin. That assumption
that besties just want to make out with each other on the dance floor at some point is
not a new thing. It's also by this time that marriage has undergone this evolution of being
a purely economic arrangement between two people who might not necessarily like each
other to being a joining of two people who are in love and are friends. Ahh. Nevertheless
throughout the 20th century, best friendship, sharing secrets, being bonded for life to
someone else in that platonic way is still considered a feminine pursuit. It's long been
assumed that women are simply better cut-out for friendships because we are more emotional
and communicative and we just love sharing ourselves with other people. Perhaps because
of that feminization of friendship there has been so much more scrutiny paid to both the
positive and negative dynamics of these women-to-women relationships. This just in. The very first
use of 'frenemy' was in 1953 by the newspaper columnist Walter Winchell although I don't
think he was describing two ladies who don't really like each other but pretend otherwise.
With the 2004 release of a Lindsey Lohan classic 'Mean Girls' the idea of women having just
as many friends as frenemies was firmly cemented in our pop cultural consciousness. There are
so many more studies devoted to putting female friendships under the microscope compared
to examining male friendships. Which is why we know for instance that girls tend to uphold
their friends to stricter standards, we also know that thanks to elevated levels of oxytocin
in our brains, hanging out with our lady friends destresses us. And according to one study
that seems to hold no scientific merit whatsoever pairs of girlfriends tend to know who is the
prettier one. Yeah I know who the prettier one is. But there was one study finding that
really jumped out to me and it was that female friendships especially earlier in life are
a lot more fragile than male friendships. That resonates with me when I read about cases
of girls cyber-bullying and social media slut-shaming and being not just frenemies but straight
up enemies to other girls and while I know experientially and just from seeing other
people around with their friends that female friendships and best friends are alive and
well I also think that today especially girls and women need to embrace and protect their
friendships more than ever before and to not take these incredible bonds between other
girls and women for granted. I want to hear from you though girls. What's it like being
a friend these days?