"One Sister Have I...": The Value of Female Friendship
*Article from Lexington Line Spring/Summer 2023 Issue, pages 82-83
Check out the full issue here
“One Sister have I in our house—
And one a hedge away.
There's only one recorded,
But both belong to me.”
—Emily Dickinson
As a child, I slept on my sister Olivia's trundle bed most nights. Falling asleep in her presence comforted me.
The four blue and pink striped walls enclosed on us in a sanctuary of sisterhood. There was a poster above her bed displaying saying like “Friends 4 Life” and peace signs in various colors, the epitome of pictures you'd find in most young girls’ bedrooms in 2010. We used it to play “I Spy.”
“I spy something purple,” Olivia would say. I would guess until we drifted off to sleep.
Now I find myself lying in my roommates’ bed spying their paintings and the outlandish number of trinkets they've collected. Sisters, whether they share blood or not, shape us. They are critical to every chapter of a woman's life—and there's nothing quite like them.
The pressure of the patriarchy can evaporate in the presence of another woman.
“When I am in a room with men,” Olivia shares, “I often have altered my appearance from when I first woke up, I watch the way I speak—the way I hold myself in the room.”
"Never once have I felt that pressure around my sisters, rarely around close female friends. It is a breath of fresh air and has been since we used to play ‘I Spy’ and dance around restaurants playing live music without a care,” she claims.
In an interview with The Daily Mail, Tony Cassidy, professor of Child and Family Health at Ulster University, says that emotional expression is key to psychological health.
“Having sisters promotes this in families,” he says.
In January, I surveyed 100 women via social media to get a sense for how they value friendships with other women. I asked about how women support each other and what sometimes keeps them from doing so.
Multiple women between 18 and 25 spoke about crying on the shoulders of female friends through various struggles.
“I've gone through an eating disorder, and no one but my two girl best friends were able to help me through it,” a 19-year-old woman—who requests to remain anonymous—shares. “They made me want to live my life not in a haze and not thinking about food all the time.”
As a woman, the times various female figures stood up for you are hard to forget. At age 51, an anonymous woman in my survey recounted a horrifying experience from her childhood.
“I was raped at age 14”, she says. “A girl I felt was mean befriended me and told me to hold my head up, that I wasn't dirty or guilty.”
These are the parts of female friendships we remember for the rest of our lives and that sustain us at pivotal moments. During pregnancy and motherhood, this means the need to seek out women who “love your children and include them in your friendship,” according to my survey.
My mother, Candice Hennessey, tells me, "the evolution of friendships grows as your children do, and the lasting friendships are those that show grace and support without question.”
The only connection between these friends might be that they had children at the same time, according to clinical psychologist Dr. Alexis E. Menken.
"And yet these relationships are powerfully supportive and provide pragmatic ways for women to come together with a problem-solving mentality,” she says.
In a time where women are supporting women loudly and publicly, we are consistently still pitted against one another in competition for looks, material, and male validation. At a young age, girls are shown that there isn't much room in our world for powerful women. We are fed the drama of female feuds, only reinstating the idea that the climb to the top is closer to a fight.
When asked about common triggers for jealousy, more than 70% of respondents mentioned “boys” or “men” with one specifying "healthy romantic relationships.”
The idea that jealousy between women is borne from competition for male validation has come to be known as “internalized misogyny.” In a 2004 article for The Journal of Sex Research, psychologist Anne Campbell investigated its roots.
“Girls, it is argued, come to ‘ventriloquize’ patriarchal male attitudes about appropriate female appearance and behavior,” she says.
Studies on inevitable jealousy in female friendships can be heavy on the heart. But these jealousies don't last forever. As women grow older, the need to envy and compare lightens.
“I have no jealousy of my friends,” a 51-year-old answered in my survey. “After cancers, deaths, and other losses, we are grateful for the time we have left together.”
There is much to learn from the wiser. In this case, there is an urgency to appreciate the female friendships you have in each stage of life—for they all serve a purpose.
You may be a mother. A sister. A friend. A role model. An aunt, cousin, grandmother, great-grandmother, or someone else. Wherever you fall, I can only hope that you have laughed the hardest and cried the longest alongside your sisters, and when need be, sat still by each other's sides. You know the precious value of those women from every phase of your life—even if they only taught you a lesson in how not to treat others.
So please remember it is not the fight you were taught it should be. You are never alone in the company of memories or current moments of female friendship. As a woman graciously said in my survey, “we are not alone… we are all just walking each other home - xo.”