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This is KZSU Stanford. My name is Robert Harrison and I am the host of this show which is called
Entitled "Pinunes". It's coming to you from the Stanford campus. One of these days I'm going
to spread my wings and do a few shows about some of my favorite movies and television series
on entitled "Pinunes". All of you in favor of that idea raise your hands or send us an email.
It won't be the usual cinema talk. It would bring to bear the distinctive
phenomenological kind of thinking that we tend to engage in on this show whatever the topic.
And I'll tell you this one of the first movies I would start with is "Thelmen Louise". Have you all seen it?
Maybe you recognize this theme song playing in the background here.
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There are some eight to nine reasons why I think "Thelmen Louise" is one of the top ten. Maybe even top five
movies of all time. In my entitled "An No Doubt Esoteric Opinion". I'll just mention one of them here
without going into too much detail. It has to do with the archetype of feminine friendship that
surges up onto the screen in this movie. The way the archetypes of Antigonee,
Philocctatees and others come alive in person on the attic stages of ancient Greece.
There's a primordial element in the friendship between these two female characters that men and women
alike recognize in its feminine universality. When the particular becomes universal in this way,
something exceptional and rare takes place in the domain of modern art,
I say that because the store of archetypes in our collective human psyche is limited.
Almost all of the great archetypes were discovered by the ancient Greeks over two millennia ago.
The modern era has added hardly any new ones to the few dozen that come to us from them. Prometheus,
Orpheus, Antigonee, Arestes, Narcissus, Adipus, but the Greeks did not have an archetype for feminine
friendship. Nor did the Romans nor did anyone else as far as I know. As I see it,
the movie Thelman Louise unearths, discovers, and brings into the sunlight of the Southern American
landscape, an archetype that hitherto laid buried in our collective unconscious.
And how often does that happen in our post-Galian era?
That's as much as I'll say about Thelman Louise today. The reason I bring up that movie at all
is because I have a guest with me in the studio who has just co-authored a book called The
"The Social Sex, a History of Feminine Friendship." It doesn't deal with Thelman Louise specifically,
but it offers a very interesting history of friendship among women from ancient times to our own.
The guest in question is my friend and colleague Marilyn Yalom, who joined me on
entitled "Pinience of Few Years Back" when we discussed her book "The American Resting Place,"
which deals with cemeteries and burial grounds in America. Since then, Marilyn has published a couple of
other fascinating books, "How the French Invented Love," 900 years of passion and romance,
came out in 2012, and then there's the book I just mentioned published this year by Harper
Perenial and co-authored with Teresa Donovan Brown, who was not able to join us today.
When it comes to things having to do with women, Marilyn Yalom's opinions are eminently entitled
"In addition to the three I just mentioned, she is also the author of best-selling books like
"A History of the Breast," 1998, "A History of the Wife," 2002, and "Birth of the Chest Queen,"
2005. It's a pleasure to welcome her back to the show Marilyn. I'm glad you could join us on
entitled "Pinience Today." I'm glad to be here too. And congratulations on this new book of yours,
"The Social Sex, A History of Feminine Friendship." Thank you.
So your book is a history in more ways than one. It provides a historical account of feminine
friendships across the ages, yet it relies mostly on historical documentation.
Historical documentation means written records for the most part. Now we can be virtually certain that
feminine friendships not only existed during the entire history and prehistory of our species,
but that they were an essential part of human society wherever and whenever it took form as a human
society. The problem is that there are hardly any written records that tell us much of anything
about female friendships before women began writing for themselves and speaking in their own voices as it were.
Thus your book has a couple of opening chapters about antiquity and the Bible, but it's not really
until the middle ages that we get any specific documentary information about such feminine friendships.
I'm referring in particular to your chapter on pre-modern nuns. Do I get that right?
Absolutely. So would you like to say a few words about the period before the pre-modern nuns
before we move on to talk about the really fascinating stuff that I found in those chapters in
subsequent ones? Well, if you look at Western history from say 600 BC to 1600 common era,
we won't find anything written by women before the middle ages. And these earlier documents were,
of course, all written by men for other men. And the focus on men's friendship is more than
a question of gendered authorship. It's a question of totally ignoring and even denigrating women
as friends. According to the male writers, for the most part, they looked as at women as incapable
of the qualities of loyalty and courage and endurance and civic mindedness that were
essential for male friendship. I was appalled, I must say, when I did the research over several
years to find that there were no exceptions by men, all of whom held the same opinion of women's
possibility as friends with each other, not mention of the possibility of their friendship with men.
So it was pretty discouraging until I came to the middle ages and there was this enormous treasure
found in the writing of medieval nuns, three volumes in a current edition of the letters of
Hildegard von Bingen, and there one finds wonderfully deep moving portrayals and descriptions
of women's attachment to one another and what we would call today their love for one another.
These were written, the letters were written in Latin and of course such a small percentage of women
or men for that matter could write in Latin or could write at all. And so it's only when literacy
comes to this group of nuns or other nuns in the middle ages that we begin to have documents
that present women's friendships from their point of view. That continues and grows slowly and slowly
and slowly throughout the middle ages and the early modern period. And one thing that I wanted to say
about the societies of nuns is it was the first time also in the Western tradition
that women had an option other than marriage in their adult lives. They did have to come with daugories
to the convent but the daugories were considerably less than what the families would have had to
have put up for marriage. And I should also point out that most of the early medieval and medieval
convents were specifically for upper class and even aristocratic women. So these choir nuns as
they were called learn to read of course, to write, to embroidery and to do other things that
would have been appropriate to their class. And in so doing they sang together, they decided the
literature together and they formed very deep friendships. These friendships would have, as I mentioned
in my intro, they would have existed in times past. It's just that we don't have the document
documentation for them. And I'm also interested in what you said that women for the first time
were able to have an alternative to marriage or to remaining with their families because it seems to
reading through your book that one of the one of the conditions for these feminine friendships to flourish
is kind of exiting from the family sphere that there has to be some place outside of the family
relations where the women could not only congregate among themselves but also lived together or
spend a great deal of time together so that the friendships would be, I don't know if you would call
them elective affinities but that they would be chosen in a way that family relations would not be
chosen. Is that correct? Absolutely. And I think Gerta's expression elective of affinities is
absolutely appropriate here. Families are very often the first place where one learns what
friendship means and so friendships between sisters, between cousins, between anease and a favorite aunt.
These become prototypes for friendships outside of the family circle. Now I think we have to
remember that not everybody gets to pick a friend or some friends outside of the family circle.
We culture today where that's not possible. In the United States at this moment women do have the
option to choose their friends and more and more the stock and friendship between women is on
the rise just as the family constraints become less and less prominent and as marriage becomes
either deferred or non-existent in the case for many women. So friends come in to fill that breach
and as we wrote this book we heard over and over and over again from various people that they
counted on their friends that their friends were a kind of Ersat's family and that they wouldn't
have made it through difficult moments of trial without their friends. Marriage in particular seems to be
as a 17th century British woman poet put it, "The bane of friendship because very often when one
marries, one's first attention, has to go to one's husband and then of course to one's children,
if one has them." And there have been moments in probably every married woman's life where she
realizes that she has to make a choice between seeing a friend and doing something for her husband
or her children and then on top of that you get the jealousy that sometimes existed on the part
of the husband. You know what Plutarch wrote to Millennium ago, to Millennium ago that a woman should
have only her husband's friends. That is sometimes the thought or has been some time within the
male mentality. Yeah I would say however that the same thing applies across to the other.
And I've lost a lot of friends who the moment they got married because they just no longer had time
for the friendship and I think that wives can be just as jealous of their husband's friends
as vice versa. So I think that I don't want to say that it's gender neutral because I know that
historically the men had the kind of civic freedoms to cultivate friendships in a way that women didn't
but talking about our own contemporary societies. I also think it's important what you said that
friends come to fill in a gap that was usually occupied by family and obviously in our own
contemporary society where family has become less of a dominant institution in most people's
lives and their kind of destinies that were friendship becomes all the more important
a value and a phenomenon to cultivate. So we talked about exiting this family sphere. Where can you
find these places where friendships can flourish? In the middle ages it's in the case of feminine
friendships we're talking now about the convents or those parts of monasteries that were reserved
segregated with women in them and then there would be the courts of early modern Europe and then
metropolis, Paris and so forth. I'd like to speak about a few of them but before we move on from
the middle ages could you just give an example of a few feminine friendships that took place
in the convents and maybe starting with Hildeguard of Bingen and maybe one or two others?
Well Hildeguard was very attached to one of her younger mentees is what we call them today one of the
younger nuns and that woman's name, Ricardo's of Fonstata has come down to us in the letters
that Hildeguard from Bingen wrote after Ricardo's had been sent to become the abbess of another institution
and Hildeguard was absolutely devastated. She wrote to Ricardo saying daughter listen to me
my sorrow is destroying the great confidence that I once had mankind. What was to me?
And why have you forsaken me? This sounds like a love letter. It was a love letter and Hildeguard didn't
stop there. She wrote to various church authorities saying please send back Ricardo's. She belongs
in my convent. So over and over again in our study of female friends we found examples of women
loving each other and expressing that love in the convents even though the church was very wary of what
they called particular friendships. Hildeguard was also a pen pal of nuns in other convents for
example Elizabeth of Foncher now who was the abbess of another double monastery and when I say
double-donisteri I mean that there was a part for the nuns as well as for the monks and they
Hildeguard and Elizabeth established a friendship through their correspondence
another pair who are very well known were meshedealed of hackaborn and gertrude who was referred to as
gertrude the great. They were together in another German cloister where meshedeal told the taught
the children and she was also known for her singing voice and for almost 40 years meshedealed shared
the company of two gertrude one was her sister and another was gertrude the great. They chanted the
liturgy together they read scripture together they worked on their spinning and embroidery they
took care of the sick and very interesting when meshedealed Foncherborn confided her visions and revelations
to gertrude the gertrude the great. Her sister nuns prevailed upon meshedealed to write down her
visions and it was only with the help of her sister nuns that meshedealed's revelations
found their way into her book of special grace so the nuns were responsible for documenting
the pronouncements of that visionary and i could give you quite a number of other examples of which
i do present in the book but do you have a section there will move on from the middle ages but
you have a section called eamautist acts and i can't not ask you to talk about that because
clearly there is in many cases what you call a homoerotic dimension to the friendship and that
this love is kind of promiscuous in terms of its flowing freely across certain categorical boundaries
so phylia in greek is a good word for that because it means the kind of affection you have a
family member love you have for a friend or even pets but there's also an erotic
dimension to some of these friendships in the in the convent is that correct?
some of them yes but we took the position to resubround and i that there is a whole spectrum
ranging from at one end what we would call platonic non-carnal friendships two sensual
friendships and sexual friendships at the other end and we include all of these in our book
without using terms that wouldn't we don't feel would be appropriate for women of the
middle ages or even the early modern period we describe them as friends or loving friends or romantic
friends and we try to be as descriptive as we can be a modest act is the title of a book written
by a juth brown when she was a professor here at stanford quite a number of years ago and it describes
the sexual relationship of two nuns in an Italian convent it was a one-foot kind recorded
right no no i remember juth brown i remember the book quite well so and i think it was well
said about how you go about describing friendships in the in this period the when you spoke about
platonic non-carnal friendships that is brings us to one of the arenas for feminine friendship
that i found particularly fascinating namely lipkistios in pears and we're talking about a few
couple of centuries a few centuries after hilt hilt the guard obviously but i knew about lipkistios
only from this kind of vicious parody that you get from molyad in his play lipkistios edi kul
but i i was persuaded that you know reading your chapter here that um they there was a strong
at what you call a proto feminist agenda at work in in these founders of the first salons can you
tell our listeners what the christian who the pearsios were and what the contribution they made
to the history of feminine friendship well i think of the salon and particularly the one that was
founded by the makies doramboye as a prototype for all future salon literary groups book clubs
by women since the seventeenth century and the makies doramboye had weekly salons in pears
and it was the first where women participated equally with men and where they added to society
distinctly feminine flavor they'd regular attendees including the future writers um madam to savi nye madam
dalafe ad man was out of skidiri but also such men as a corne maynage other names that are very
familiar in the french literary world and one of the things that madam doramboye did was that she
encouraged all of these people to elevate their speech and their behavior to a level
considered appropriate for refra fine society so uh what happened is that they did
avoid words that were vulgar and um sometimes perhaps they used what we would today call you
for misms but unfortunately molly air's play lay price years we goo love 1661 he'd such
ridicule upon them that for most friends people today and for you obviously and others
as soon as they hear the word price years they automatically add the word or any goo while they
weren't ridiculous if you read their letters and we have extensive volumes of letters and documents
from this period there we have an embarrassment of riches um you know that they they were friends
in the real sense of the world that is they were affectionate towards one another they were self
revelatory they counted on each other for help um madam dolafayat writes to madam to savigne and also to
maynage the poet asking can you help me find an apartment can you help me find a place in the
mary because my house in parrots is rented they lend each other money madam dolafayat lent
money to madam to savigne so that she would have a dowry for her daughter they met almost daily when
they were in parrots it was in some ways an ideal society of friends and it lasted between madam
to savigne and madam dolafayat until they died yeah both of them significant authors in their own
rights no absolutely madam to savigne is known for her letters which uh which comprise at least
three volumes in the famous prestigious um galle mau addition and um madam dolafayat was of course
the author of laparancestic lab the princess of cleaves which she published anonymously
but uh which is in my opinion and in opinion of many others the first psychological novel in the
western tradition and certainly the most significant French novel of the 17th century um
but what grew me and was the friendship between these two women a madam to savigne and madam dolafayat
and at the end of near the end of madam dolafayat's life she writes to madam to savigne saying
you are the person I have loved the most in all my life she was married she had children she was
very close with la rush for cool another great French author but when she wrote to madam to savigne
it was with words that we would associate with love as well as with loving friendship
so marin dapar from their own friendship my impression is that these sannals that were uh came
and emerged in in paris at this time which were different from the courts of the royal courts or
the high aristocratic courts where you had ladies with their entourage where you write about that as
well that's another kind of arena for friendship where friendships extra familial friendships were able to
occur but here I think there's some innovations and tell me if I get this wrong but I think it's
the first time that something like a friendship between a man and a woman can actually take place
in a sannal by that I mean a friendship which is not necessarily based on erotic desire or courtship
but is mon ami, chimon ami, ami, there were a great deal of men included among these women
no yes absolutely and the women had friendships with men as savigne and la fayette had with the poet
minaj which lasted to the end of their lives what was different was that the women set the tone
and you could be a member of the sannal only if you respected the fact that women were at least
the equal of men in these sannal and this is so interesting because in France that tradition lasted
into the 20th century if you were a male writer and you wanted to make it in French society
you had to be invited by a woman in the 17th or the 18th or the 19th or the 20th century into one of
these sannal so the women were exercising power they were the gatekeepers to how one's book becomes
launched and there is no doubt about it that real friendships developed around what we would think of
as books literary questions philosophical questions and it was if not unique one can always find an earlier
predecessor in France or in Italy for example but it was such a social phenomenon that it took
hold in France it drifted into the provinces it drifted into other European countries I mean we
still speak today about sannal I know of someone in San Francisco who has a sannal I have a literary
sannal for women which was inspired by a former professor of English at Stanford Diane Middlebrook
when ran it together before she died and she was the inspiration for this book well maybe entitled
opinions is a sannal and it's own right you know a place of discussion and a place of friendship yeah I
have to say that in the modern period France has done more than any other culture to civilize
the West in the in the sphere of culture and the role that these women that we're talking about
it played in that civilizing process where to begin with the price of admission is that you
have to respect women at least as much as as the men and that they weren't there just to promote
the works of male writers they were also there to encourage each other to become literary to
write to find find the sources of self-expression and take up their own voices at the same time
can you say a few words about Mademoiselle this scudie is that her name yes Mademoiselle
scudie who wrote mega bestsellers in the 17th century and she was not wealthy she didn't have
the background the money the power that Mademoiselle and Mademoiselle have had so all the more
reason to admire the fact that she was invited to the salon of the Marquis d'Orangbé
Baguié and that she founded her own salon that included even bourgeois women and when she went on
to write these when I say mega novels they were five and ten volumes and nobody reads them anymore
today because they're too long and they're too price years but she did describe some of the salon and
some of the people who were part of the women's salon she did not use their names she she used
assumed names very precious assumed names absolutely and but she raises some of the questions about
friendship that are very important throughout history and that is can you have too many friends
if you're friendly to everyone it does that mean that your friendships mean anything and think
about today's internet friendships where people have 250 or 300 so-called friends well what does
that mean if you water it down to that extent what she raises issues like that and she raises she
uses the word amity of course which by then took on a much greater meaning it could also mean love
sure so the boundaries between friendship and love are very blurred she was quite an amazing
woman she never married she earned her living from her pen she had a great she had an important
circle of friends and they supported each other in many many ways yeah and you also point out that
although at originally it was the aristocracy you had to have a title but that there it was not
hierarchical in the sense that Madan des Scudier he was not a rich woman she was actually
quite modest in her means but she could be befriended as an equal by in the Khanda Matkes
and it was it was their with their literary intelligence their
manner of being that they they were admitted as friends on criteria of things other than social
rank only you're absolutely right I can't emphasize that more the boundaries of class as later on
the boundaries of race are very often maintained in friendships it's hard to cross those boundaries
but at least in the literary world there were people who were not of the aristocracy and who
were received into the so-called best circles so when you speak about France I mean I am an avid
francophile and it is because of this tradition that I found in France of literature and art
and a general civilized culture that what can speak of friendships that do cross
class and that I hope are still vibrant in France today yeah now it's skipping just a little bit
you have a chapter that interests me also in particular on romantic friendships and here romantic
doesn't mean like romance but it means the romantic peer that they take place during what we call
romanticism and can you say a few words about romantic friendship what does romanticism
do to to how does it decline the feminine friendships in this particular period
the public face of feminine friendship really takes off around 1800 and of course we're speaking
about the romantic period in in the west and Nancy caught the American historian when she writes about
the bonds of womanhood she suggests that from the late and 18th century through the mid 19th century
there's a newly self-conscious concept of female friendship that is equated with love
empathy the emotions and the emotions come to the fore in romanticism particularly in the pre-romantic
and romantic movements and literature between 1761 I give that date as a starting point because
it's the date of Rousseau's new El Wies, La Nouvele Louise and the 1770s, Agerta's
sorrows of young Vertere so when we think of the 18th century we often think first of the enlightenment
and reason but at the same time you get this nascent focus on sensibility emotions love and ultimately
on friendship and like love affairs romantic friendships take off for women at this period
often initiated in in adolescence we begin to see in the particularly in the early 19th century
autobiography where women talk about the crushes they have on each other I think of
Georges Sal and her eastward Mavie she talks about the great love she had for other girls and even
for the nuns in the convent school where she went and she describes the rituals that these girls
established where you made a list of who your best friend was this doesn't sound so far from what
goes on in middle schools today and if you said Joanna was your best friend and she was number one on
the list you couldn't change that so it is we see these kind of rituals that get established in the
early 19th century and what was called romantic friendships the first time I ran across that term
was in a letter about the women who became known as the ladies of Langachlan these were two Irish
women who ran off together to Wales in the late 18th century they wanted to live together of course
their families thought that this was unacceptable and got brought them back but in one of the
letters about this a family member says well it was only a romantic friendship no gentlemen were
involved and so that was not a disgrace for the family in the end the two women were allowed to
go off and live together in Wales and they became iconic figures even written about in words
where it's poetry so there is an acceptance that women love one another but as early in this early 19th
century it's assumed that their love is quote pure or chased and we continue to see expressions of these
romantic friendships all through the 19th century including well one of the ones I write about
in the book is the friendship of Adele Schopenhauer and her good friend Sybil Merton's a married woman
who had six children and Adele was a single woman she was the sister I have to say unfortunately
of Arthur Schopenhauer why unfortunately well he was such a misogynist but then of course
he didn't get on with men or women so women or men let's put it this way Adele's relationship with
Sybil was the great love of her life the great friendship of her life they spent time in
born in Germany in Cologne during the winter Sybil also ran a salo and she and well the two of them
formed such a friendship that they went to Italy together and when Sybil's husband died
Adele and Sybil could live together more openly and when Adele was dying Sybil took care of her
she saw that she had her medicines she put flowers by her bed she died she did what women always do
for others who are sick they take care of their family members they take care of their parents they
take care of their children and they take care of their friends so that that great friendship
has come down in history although it's not very well known but it produced something that I have
never seen elsewhere and that is a tombstone that Sybil erected and put in the cemetery in
Bonn she wrote it in Italian by the way because the Italy was the great meeting place for the two
women it's a testimonial to their friendship and she wrote on the tombstone here lies
well the long name of a girl's soap and hauer after a life of 52 years outstanding in heart
spirit talent the best of daughter and true to her friends this monument was erected by her
inconsolable friend Sybil Mertens, Shalfhausen I've never seen that anywhere else and if anyone
listening to this program sees a tombstone that has been erected by a friend to another friend
in the 19th and even 20th century please let me know where is the tomb Marilyn the tomb is in the
old Bonn cemetery, old Bonn cemetery because there is the famous tomb of Keats obviously in the
Protestant cemetery of Rome and that was done by his friend John Severin but he doesn't declare
himself as a friend he just speaks of Keats dying in the bitterness of his enemies and wishing these
words to be engraven on his tombstone here lies one whose name was written in water it's obvious
obvious that only a friend could have created a you know a headstone like that for another friend
although it's naturally not in the words that we read on the headstone as such so well I know Robert
you and I have a very special interest in cemetery and I am certainly familiar as you are too with
the many many American gravestones that don't even give him give the wife a name she's a man's name
is there and then you say his wife or sometimes his wife and the name is there but in my many years
of looking at tombstones I was struck when I ran across this one it is unique for sure
Marilyn I'm going to give our listeners a little sense of the scope of your book because we've
jumped from one chapter to another but here just from the table of contents so you have those
first opening chapters on friendship in the Bible and then another one on philosophers and clerks
which we're talking about antiquity and then so we have pre-modern nuns we talked about that
gossips and soulmates we didn't talk about that precious ladies talked about that patriotic
friendships we skipped ice gift to talk about romantic friendships and then you have a chapter
called quilt pray club and then college girls city girls and new women and the new woman I'm sorry
and then Eleanor Roosevelt and her friends then from couplehood to sisterhood and then in the last
section friend to missy give and take friendship in a market economy can women and men be just
friends and finally an epilogue called female friendship what in jurors and we're not going to
cover all those bases but just chapter 10 Eleanor Roosevelt and her friends really stands out as
an item of curiosity and I have to say your book was so engrossing that I saw I felt like I
couldn't skip any of these sections without losing something interesting so I haven't actually
gotten to the end of it because we decided to do this so just a few days ago I haven't read the
chapter on Eleanor Roosevelt and her friends so I curious what does it deal with and who were her
friends I didn't intend to write a chapter about Eleanor Roosevelt until one of my friends took me
aside the husband of a very very close friend and he said you must write about Eleanor Roosevelt
and I tried not to but then I started to read the letters that Eleanor and her first of all her very
closest first friend had written to one another and then the other collections of letters
throughout her life then the biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt and I discovered that her friends
had really been midwives to the person she became after she had married her husband and after she had
had six children within the first ten years of her marriage and after she was shocked to discover in
1918 that Franklin had been having an affair with her own social secretary she was totally
devastated she was at such a low point in her life that it was really only her friendships that pulled
her through and what I discovered is that somehow in the 1920s she became friends with a two or four
really four different women who were what we called then new women that is independent women
who were living either alone or in couples in Granite village some of them were graduates of Smith
and Wellesley my own alma mater that is women's colleges and when Eleanor began to know these women
and to go and visit with them and to read poetry with them and to dine alone with them during the 1920s
and she began to get interested in politics and democratic politics in the League of Women voters
the world court and this really brought her out of what we today might have called it
the oppression the historian
Darris Curren's Goodwin has said that she talks about the four women
played a substantial role in the education of Eleanor Roosevelt they tutored her in politics
and they encouraged to open herself up emotionally so it was these women who acted as midwives
to the person we now think of as Eleanor Roosevelt what's more they did two very interesting things
together they formed a school where Eleanor taught English and history and they created a company
called the Val kill industries where they tried to revive local handicrafts and
Eleanor was very active in these kind of endeavors and she said herself that she thought that
shared activities was one of the best ways for women to form friendships and she did that
right up to well really the end of her life so that her friendships form such an important
period such an important part of her life that once I got into it it was very easy to write an
entire chapter about her now of course sometimes there were moments of strain and misunderstanding
inner friendships and I write about that in addition Eleanor had some very very important male friendships
and she had one friendship that is still a subject of intense debate amongst Eleanor's historians
and that is her friendship with Lorena Hick also called Hick who was a journalist and a journalist
with whom Eleanor had a very passionate relationship as early as 1932 she was a very tall woman weighing
200 pounds she was from a working-class family she had a very very difficult family history
and but she became indispensable to Eleanor it was Hick who suggested Eleanor that she
hold weekly news conferences with the press and that the reporters be limited to women and one of the things
that intrigued me the most was that in July 1933 Eleanor and Hick managed to take a road trip
together I'm thinking of that in particular because of the introduction about thelma and the wheeze
and they went off together to New York to New England and to French Canada and I can you imagine today
a first lady of the United States driving her own car in this case a blue Buick convertible
and she didn't have any security agents and that's exactly what Eleanor and Hick did
for three weeks and when they returned to the White House because by then Franklin was in the White
House he quickly scheduled a private dinner so that they could tell him all about their adventures
Eleanor and Hick sometimes found opportunities to work together on causes concerning the underprivileged
and they exchanged dozens and dozens hundreds of letters that are now today in the Roosevelt library
and the rhetoric in these letters is exactly the rhetoric of romantic friendships I miss you I love you
with all my heart I love you and of course this has lent itself to various interpretations
by feminist scholars today yeah Maryland time for one more of your chapters briefly and I guess
I'm going to choose can women and men be just friends because I haven't read that one either
and I don't want to yes or no answer to it but just what is the problem there about it can women
and men be just friends well just friends has a special resonance today does it not
in a time when people very often move quickly into sex and so when two people speak about
their friendship and they say we're just friends it means that they're not having sex we wrote that
chapter it was mostly the work of Teresa starting with a film that many of you perhaps remember
and that was Harry and Sally when Harry met Sally that iconic film from the 1980s I think it was
late 1980s and Harry of course takes the position that women and men cannot be friends because the sex
thing gets in the way as he puts it and Sally takes the position you know well of course we
can be friends with men she does somewhat change her mind by the end of the film but essentially
men and women are taking different positions in that film on whether men and women can be friends
now we've seen as far back as well the past years that men and women can be friends and more
and more in the 20th century as women are taking on roles that men would have had exclusively
in the past that is to say in the military that men and women singles and couples
LGBT and straight people are part of friendship groups and gender is becoming we think less and less
significant in these friendships in college friendships in work friendships in sports friendships
I mean after all title nine did pave the way for women to enter into sports in a big way and
sometimes they're on the same teams with men or with boys increasingly as women join traditionally
male professions as equals and they find work they find workplace friends of either gender
so you know we think that co-ed means boys and girls together and many campuses allow male and female
students well to share the same dormitory certainly that was the case it has been the case at Stanford
strangely enough we find that men naturally gravitate toward women
as their best friends often if a guy marries in this day well I don't know how often but if a guy
marries he might ask a woman to be his best man or to be one of his best grooms men grooms women
but it doesn't seem to work in the other direction that women are not necessarily asking men
to be to stand up for them at their wedding so there's a lot of interesting stuff going on today
in that cross-gender friendships I should also point out that there was a period particularly in the
80s where ugly terms like fag hags turned up and that is women developing intense friendships close
friendships with gay men so a lot is changing particularly in the last I would say 20 years
where we see more and more cross-gender friendships one thing we like to say over and over again
is that something a long-term friendships because it's an added to that I remember it as a girl
meet new friends keep the old one is silver and the other gold and there is something very special
about the friends that you had either in childhood or in college or in early adulthood
and I say this to younger people all the time hold on to them don't let them go they become
increasingly valuable to you as witnesses of your life as you get older and older
not only witnesses there's a kind of power of bonding in youth that I think we can
considerably you know later in life and that the intensity and longevity of certain friendships
it's remarkable how especially in America in the college years those seem to be the friendships that
have a lasting power even more than previous high school or grade school friendships and
holding on is important and regarding you know the gender thing I mean if I say some of my best
friends are women I'm using an expression that's dubious because that has always been invoked for
other things but I think there's a way in which that I would like to propose that it not be flattened
out that at a certain point men and women can be friends equally and in a neutrally regardless of
gender but that there's a special quality of male female friendships that has yet to be cultivated
to his full potential that would make for a very different kind of friendship ideally I would I would
suggest then that you know just between men and men or between women and women and that this third
way is important to keep open in this possibilities because it would include elements
that have to do with the ambiguity of can we be just friends and so forth that would that would
maybe enhance the possibilities of you know holding converse on the level of ideas and coming to each
others anytime some need and so forth. That's very lovely Robert I really appreciate that
you always make me think beyond what I have proposed in a book and thought about for a very long
time the idea that there would be something special in the future and that we're creating right
now. I believe so yeah and here we go you and me friends very good friends so thanks again Marilyn
for coming on in title opinions we've been speaking with Marilyn Yalom the book is the social
sex a history of feminine friendship I think you've got a very good flavor of what's in there
and I hope you'll all go and read it. Thanks again Marilyn. Thank you Robert I'm Robert Harrison
for in title opinions bye bye
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