Last night two of my closest friends and I bade each other goodnight in our traditional style: a hug, an exclamatory “darling” and a whispered, emphatic, “I adore you.” Sometimes these friends will leave me phone messages saying things like “There’s no reason at all for this text other than to say that you are a wonder and a marvel” and I respond in kind. In the office, work friends and I engage in delicious sotto voce gossip and twinkling intellectual debate, while at home my neighbour and I blend instrumentalism (looking after animals, collecting parcels) with joyful, everyday intimacies. The highest compliment I could give my partner is that he feels like my dearest, wittiest friend.
I confess that I may have a greater orientation towards friendship than many. But I am not alone in drawing on friendship bonds, in all their multitudinous incarnations, for spiritual nourishment, the sharing of resources, mutual psychological interrogation and political solidarity. As philosophers have argued since the classical period, friendship is essential to human flourishing. In Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle declared it to be “an indispensable component of the good life.” Nobody, he said, “would choose to live without friends, even if he had all the other goods.”
Novelists have also long exalted its virtues — from Charlotte’s Web (“It’s not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both”) to E.M. Forster (“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country”). More recently, academics have urged its importance in the context of a growing loneliness epidemic. As one sociologist remarked in 2009: “In truth, friendship has a bigger impact on our psychological wellbeing than family relationships.”
Compared to family or professional relationships, though, friendship exists almost entirely in the absence of institutional support and largely bereft of research. Where the status of a spouse is significant in tax law, and where family members or colleagues have various duties and privileges in criminal law, the friend sits shivering and alone, holding a status rarely seen by law as significant — and in many instances, such as wills and donations or employment law, treated as suspect.
Carer’s leave for a family member is an obvious right, as are visitation privileges, but for a friend they require negotiation. At no point was this bias more blatant than during Covid, when people were initially permitted to form bubbles with romantic partners but not friends. And while there are whole sections of the library devoted to studies of marriage and the family, friendship is largely neglected. What’s more, those studies that do exist tend to focus on representations of friendship in literary or philosophical records, which means the scholarship is overwhelmingly slanted towards elite pale males.
Prescriptive literature from across the centuries — from etiquette and conduct manuals to philosophy and glossy magazines — tells us a lot about what friendship should look like but very little about how it’s experienced in all its improvised messiness. Very few poor or marginalised people left behind diaries or letters revealing how they conducted their friendships, and those who did now have them hidden inside family papers: a form of archival cataloguing that speaks volumes about the cultural priority we afford the nuclear family unit. (One of my fantasy research projects is to develop an archive and library of friendship.)
It is for these reasons, and so many more, that Tiffany Watt Smith’s dazzlingly brilliant, wise and joyous book Bad Friend: A Century of Revolutionary Friendships is so welcome, in scholarly, feminist and wider societal senses. Watt Smith is a rare kind of scholar — someone able to move seamlessly between pop culture, television series, films, her own friendships, psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and her expertise in the history of the emotions since medieval times. This book has the kind of erudition and voluptuous prose of Peter Gay, the personal honesty and irreverence of Vivian Gornick, the methodological experimentation and political acuity of Saidiya Hartman and the sage and witty life advice of a good friend.
Bad Friend tells the history of modern female friendship in Britain and the United States from the early 1900s through to the present day, focusing on its most morally ambiguous and emotionally vexed dimensions. If women today are sold friendship in brightly lit, saccharine and uncomplicated forms, Watt Smith reveals a more nuanced and culturally contingent reality.
Moving chronologically across the twentieth century, she begin with the passionate entanglements of youth and efforts to control female friendships from the early 1900s to the 1940s. Then, spanning the 1940s to the 1980s, she explores the friendship negotiations of midlife, when children and marriage might, for some, demand priority. She concludes in the period from the 1980s to today by examining how we call on friends as we age together, exploring friendship pacts and cooperative living among women.
Drawing on archives from “boarding schools, prisons, factories and film sets, suburban streets and urban ghettoes, protests and… hospital wards… communities of women ageing together and… internet chat rooms,” Bad Friend is a more inclusive, expansive and multilayered history of friendship than any other written to date. If the archives are patchy and incomplete, or written from the perspective of authorities, as they tend to be for racial minorities, Watt Smith turns to ethnography or speculative biography to ensure that all her characters have equally rich stories.
This is also a remarkably tender history, partly because of Watt Smith’s brave decision to structure the book around the friendships that have defined the key stages of her life. Challenging the objective, omniscient narrator of traditional history, this method creates an exquisite intimacy with the reader and avoids naturalising her own conventional life trajectory: intense female friendships in her twenties; babies, marriage and a career in her thirties and forties; the reinvigoration of friendship in her fifties and beyond. It also adds a therapeutic dimension to the book.
Watt Smith was prompted to research friendship because of her own history of broken friendships: her feeling that, as a “bad friend,” she had failed in “an essential element of feminine and feminist life.” In the course of the book we come to see how most women can’t help but fail at friendship, given the very exacting standards to which female friendship is held and the fantasy of a complete merger with one’s friend that results in feelings of betrayal when one or the other decides to change. Readers will leave this book with an understanding both of how friendship was modernised in the twentieth century and of how to be a kinder and more generous friend.
So how did female friendship become subject to such suffocatingly high standards? This is a question best answered by an historian of the emotions like Watt Smith, someone who can show how feelings we imagine to be spontaneous, voluntary and private are shaped by changing political and social forces. As these public structures shift so too do the rules that govern our private relationships.
For at least two thousand years, as Watt Smith explains, Western philosophers considered women to be incapable of true friendships. At most, they might form attachments based on utility or pleasure rather than deep loyalties and intersubjective knowledge. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, as the separation between home and work and public and private hardened with the beginning of the industrial revolution, bourgeois women were increasingly sequestered into the private realm of domesticity, family, emotion, spirituality and femininity, and a corresponding revolution occurred in women’s friendships. Once derided as being incapable of true friendship, women were now celebrated as having the most tender, selfless, elevated and heartfelt bonds.
In dominant discourses, these intense, romantic relationships between women could train them for their future roles as wives and mothers, though an emerging countervailing feminist literature saw them as a superior substitute. Unmarried women, according to Anglo-Irish writer Frances Power Cobbe, did not need to fear a “solitary age as the bachelor must… [as] she will find a woman ready to share it.” As Watt Smith puts it, “romantic female friendship was no longer only a symbol of female domesticity, it was also the key to female liberation.”
How elite white women in the early twentieth century — more educated, more autonomous and more enfranchised than their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors — inherited these ideas is wonderfully explored in a chapter on romantic friendships focusing on girls’ boarding schools and sentimental stories. Popular literature in the late nineteenth century was filled with stories of romantic friendships between girls: Beatrice and Alice, for example, who in one story “loved each other dearly and with their arms about each other would sit under the deep shadow of the trees listening for the cuckoos’ notes.” Moving from public narratives to private experiences, Watt Smith mines the archives of boarding schools to find school records tallying which of the girls were “gone” on other girls. Female students, she notes, would be seen “performing earnest acts of service for their beloved, filling her hot water bottle, turning down her bed, preparing gifts of dried flowers, saving biscuits from tea to press, soggily, into her hand.”
Teachers were also often targets for young girls’ affections: “I have caught the contagion: I have fallen in love,” wrote one student at Mount Holyoke college in New England to her sister in 1893. “With Dr Lowell [a female professor] of course… [T]he girls tease me unmercifully about it…I am not exactly crushed only I like her very much… [H]alf the girls are in love with her and the other half almost hate her.”
By the second decade of the twentieth century these same relationships were seen as pathological and in need of regulation. Women’s magazines like Harper’s Bazaar asked parents if their daughters were likely to fall victim to “crushitis.” Love letters between girls published in student magazines were replaced by warnings to not “get a crush” on other women, as the 1913 Smith College Handbook cautioned, while principals told girls that romantic friendships were a form of “mental instability” that “catches hold of you and is a roaring fire all in a minute.”
As Watt Smith notes, it would give you whiplash to see how quickly the norms changed — a panic she ascribes primarily to the homophobia that accompanied the rise of psychology and sexology in the early twentieth century. And at around the same time that romantic friendships were being designated a sign of sexual inversion by Havelock Ellis and Freud, eugenicist discourses warned about “race suicide.” If white women opted for female friendships over being wives and mothers then whites, it was feared, would be swamped by black people.
Watt Smith’s ability, seen in this chapter, to bring prescriptive literature, popular culture and everyday practice into dialogue continues throughout the book, providing the empirical scaffolding through which she identifies the peculiarly modern aspects of twentieth century female friendship: “the promise of liberation, self-invention, freedom and choice” as well as the invention of the “bad friend” to police new norms. Her prose is so lucid and engaging that it’s easy to lose sight of the significant scholarly interventions she makes into feminist history, social history and the history of the emotions.
She is certainly not the first to note the existence of romantic friendships in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, but she is the first for some years now to insist on them as friendships. In the wake of queer theory in the 90s and 2000s, scholars rushed in to read romantic friendships as evidence of secret queer or lesbian intimacies — a thesis Watt Smith doesn’t deny, though she refuses to relinquish their importance as forms of friendship. It is not that these intimacies had no obvious erotic elements but that the division between the sexual and the “purely” amicable is ultimately unhelpful.
Similar important scholarly interventions are seen in her chapters on the various utilitarian dimensions of female friendships. Most historians, following sociologist Allan Silver’s groundbreaking research, accept that the mid-eighteenth century witnessed a separation of friendship from calculation, or intimacy from instrumentalism. Prior to the nineteenth century, in a world that ran on patronage, anyone from your accountant, your trading partner, your kin or your marital partner could be referred to as a friend. In the absence of banks and transparent state bureaucracy, friendship networks stretching across the British empire were used to fill employment posts, borrow money, invest in capital, woo partners and divulge secrets. As state and financial infrastructure developed, commerce became separated from friendship and friendship, Silver argues, returning to its original Aristotelian meaning as a private, authentic, virtuous bond separate from economic concerns.
Although she doesn’t explicitly make the case, Watt Smith’s book does a brilliant job of showing just how male-centric and class-based this argument is. In fact, the poor or those burdened by a sick dependent had no choice but to rely on reciprocal exchanges of food, childcare and neighbourly services. That friendship has always had an instrumentalist element is illuminated by case studies of cooperative childcare arrangements in working-class British suburbs and in poor African American areas such as The Flats. In these places, says Watt Smith, friendship was built up “not only because of their history or because they loved one another, but because each was able to trust the other would offer a fair exchange” — a notion Aristotle would sniff at and that we supposedly outgrew in our freer, modern world.
My only cause for consternation in this otherwise marvellous book came from a tendency to overstate the case, which was probably encouraged by a publisher keen for a wide, popular audience. Having examined friendship in the eighteenth century, I’m unconvinced by Watt Smith’s claim that at no point in history has friendship mattered so much as now. While it’s true that the rise in singledom means that more people will rely on friends than possibly ever before, there is also an argument to be made for the extraordinary importance of friendship in societies that run on trust and promise-keeping, such as we see in the eighteenth century. Definitive universalising claims tend to provoke searches for counter-examples: is it not more interesting to simply chart the shifting forms and rules governing friendship as society changes?
The notion that the “bad friend” was invented in the twentieth century also left me cold. What about the reams of advice literature or epistolary novels on the problem of “false friends” in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Writers spilled vast amount of ink, just as they do today, explaining how to distinguish a flatterer from a friend or how to keep “Pecksniffian interlopers,” in Dickens’s terms, out of your home. Indeed, in the early Australian colony the term seduction was used to excoriate and even incriminate the female “bad influences” who lured other servant girls away from domesticity and work towards the devilish delights of autonomy.
But these are the kinds of criticisms that only another historian of friendship is likely to offer. For anybody else, this book will likely be one of the best things you’ve read all year. •
Bad Friend: A Century of Revolutionary Friendships
By Tiffany Watt Smith | Faber & Faber | $34.99 | 336 pages
