11/18/2015
Marilyn Yalom on Female Friendship
Dr. Marilyn Yalom grew up in Washington D.C. and was educated at Wellesley College, the Sorbonne, Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She has been married to the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom for fifty years and is the mother of four children and the grandmother of five. She has been a professor of French and comparative literature, director […]
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This is KZSU Stanford. My name is Robert Harrison and I am the host of this show which is called
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Entitled "Pinunes". It's coming to you from the Stanford campus. One of these days I'm going
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to spread my wings and do a few shows about some of my favorite movies and television series
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on entitled "Pinunes". All of you in favor of that idea raise your hands or send us an email.
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It won't be the usual cinema talk. It would bring to bear the distinctive
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phenomenological kind of thinking that we tend to engage in on this show whatever the topic.
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And I'll tell you this one of the first movies I would start with is "Thelmen Louise". Have you all seen it?
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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
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movies of all time. In my entitled "An No Doubt Esoteric Opinion". I'll just mention one of them here
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without going into too much detail. It has to do with the archetype of feminine friendship that
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surges up onto the screen in this movie. The way the archetypes of Antigonee,
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Philocctatees and others come alive in person on the attic stages of ancient Greece.
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There's a primordial element in the friendship between these two female characters that men and women
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alike recognize in its feminine universality. When the particular becomes universal in this way,
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something exceptional and rare takes place in the domain of modern art,
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I say that because the store of archetypes in our collective human psyche is limited.
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Almost all of the great archetypes were discovered by the ancient Greeks over two millennia ago.
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The modern era has added hardly any new ones to the few dozen that come to us from them. Prometheus,
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Orpheus, Antigonee, Arestes, Narcissus, Adipus, but the Greeks did not have an archetype for feminine
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friendship. Nor did the Romans nor did anyone else as far as I know. As I see it,
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the movie Thelman Louise unearths, discovers, and brings into the sunlight of the Southern American
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landscape, an archetype that hitherto laid buried in our collective unconscious.
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And how often does that happen in our post-Galian era?
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That's as much as I'll say about Thelman Louise today. The reason I bring up that movie at all
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is because I have a guest with me in the studio who has just co-authored a book called The
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"The Social Sex, a History of Feminine Friendship." It doesn't deal with Thelman Louise specifically,
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but it offers a very interesting history of friendship among women from ancient times to our own.
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The guest in question is my friend and colleague Marilyn Yalom, who joined me on
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entitled "Pinience of Few Years Back" when we discussed her book "The American Resting Place,"
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which deals with cemeteries and burial grounds in America. Since then, Marilyn has published a couple of
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other fascinating books, "How the French Invented Love," 900 years of passion and romance,
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came out in 2012, and then there's the book I just mentioned published this year by Harper
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Perenial and co-authored with Teresa Donovan Brown, who was not able to join us today.
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When it comes to things having to do with women, Marilyn Yalom's opinions are eminently entitled
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"In addition to the three I just mentioned, she is also the author of best-selling books like
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"A History of the Breast," 1998, "A History of the Wife," 2002, and "Birth of the Chest Queen,"
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2005. It's a pleasure to welcome her back to the show Marilyn. I'm glad you could join us on
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entitled "Pinience Today." I'm glad to be here too. And congratulations on this new book of yours,
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"The Social Sex, A History of Feminine Friendship." Thank you.
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So your book is a history in more ways than one. It provides a historical account of feminine
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friendships across the ages, yet it relies mostly on historical documentation.
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Historical documentation means written records for the most part. Now we can be virtually certain that
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feminine friendships not only existed during the entire history and prehistory of our species,
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but that they were an essential part of human society wherever and whenever it took form as a human
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society. The problem is that there are hardly any written records that tell us much of anything
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about female friendships before women began writing for themselves and speaking in their own voices as it were.
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Thus your book has a couple of opening chapters about antiquity and the Bible, but it's not really
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until the middle ages that we get any specific documentary information about such feminine friendships.
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I'm referring in particular to your chapter on pre-modern nuns. Do I get that right?
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Absolutely. So would you like to say a few words about the period before the pre-modern nuns
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before we move on to talk about the really fascinating stuff that I found in those chapters in
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subsequent ones? Well, if you look at Western history from say 600 BC to 1600 common era,
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we won't find anything written by women before the middle ages. And these earlier documents were,
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of course, all written by men for other men. And the focus on men's friendship is more than
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a question of gendered authorship. It's a question of totally ignoring and even denigrating women
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as friends. According to the male writers, for the most part, they looked as at women as incapable
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of the qualities of loyalty and courage and endurance and civic mindedness that were
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essential for male friendship. I was appalled, I must say, when I did the research over several
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years to find that there were no exceptions by men, all of whom held the same opinion of women's
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possibility as friends with each other, not mention of the possibility of their friendship with men.
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So it was pretty discouraging until I came to the middle ages and there was this enormous treasure
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found in the writing of medieval nuns, three volumes in a current edition of the letters of
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Hildegard von Bingen, and there one finds wonderfully deep moving portrayals and descriptions
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of women's attachment to one another and what we would call today their love for one another.
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These were written, the letters were written in Latin and of course such a small percentage of women
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or men for that matter could write in Latin or could write at all. And so it's only when literacy
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comes to this group of nuns or other nuns in the middle ages that we begin to have documents
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that present women's friendships from their point of view. That continues and grows slowly and slowly
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and slowly throughout the middle ages and the early modern period. And one thing that I wanted to say
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about the societies of nuns is it was the first time also in the Western tradition
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that women had an option other than marriage in their adult lives. They did have to come with daugories
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to the convent but the daugories were considerably less than what the families would have had to
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have put up for marriage. And I should also point out that most of the early medieval and medieval
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convents were specifically for upper class and even aristocratic women. So these choir nuns as
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they were called learn to read of course, to write, to embroidery and to do other things that
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would have been appropriate to their class. And in so doing they sang together, they decided the
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literature together and they formed very deep friendships. These friendships would have, as I mentioned
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in my intro, they would have existed in times past. It's just that we don't have the document
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documentation for them. And I'm also interested in what you said that women for the first time
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were able to have an alternative to marriage or to remaining with their families because it seems to
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reading through your book that one of the one of the conditions for these feminine friendships to flourish
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is kind of exiting from the family sphere that there has to be some place outside of the family
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relations where the women could not only congregate among themselves but also lived together or
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spend a great deal of time together so that the friendships would be, I don't know if you would call
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them elective affinities but that they would be chosen in a way that family relations would not be
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chosen. Is that correct? Absolutely. And I think Gerta's expression elective of affinities is
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absolutely appropriate here. Families are very often the first place where one learns what
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friendship means and so friendships between sisters, between cousins, between anease and a favorite aunt.
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These become prototypes for friendships outside of the family circle. Now I think we have to
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remember that not everybody gets to pick a friend or some friends outside of the family circle.
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We culture today where that's not possible. In the United States at this moment women do have the
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option to choose their friends and more and more the stock and friendship between women is on
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the rise just as the family constraints become less and less prominent and as marriage becomes
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either deferred or non-existent in the case for many women. So friends come in to fill that breach
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and as we wrote this book we heard over and over and over again from various people that they
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counted on their friends that their friends were a kind of Ersat's family and that they wouldn't
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have made it through difficult moments of trial without their friends. Marriage in particular seems to be
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as a 17th century British woman poet put it, "The bane of friendship because very often when one
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marries, one's first attention, has to go to one's husband and then of course to one's children,
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if one has them." And there have been moments in probably every married woman's life where she
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realizes that she has to make a choice between seeing a friend and doing something for her husband
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or her children and then on top of that you get the jealousy that sometimes existed on the part
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of the husband. You know what Plutarch wrote to Millennium ago, to Millennium ago that a woman should
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have only her husband's friends. That is sometimes the thought or has been some time within the
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male mentality. Yeah I would say however that the same thing applies across to the other.
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And I've lost a lot of friends who the moment they got married because they just no longer had time
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for the friendship and I think that wives can be just as jealous of their husband's friends
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as vice versa. So I think that I don't want to say that it's gender neutral because I know that
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historically the men had the kind of civic freedoms to cultivate friendships in a way that women didn't
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but talking about our own contemporary societies. I also think it's important what you said that
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friends come to fill in a gap that was usually occupied by family and obviously in our own
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contemporary society where family has become less of a dominant institution in most people's
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lives and their kind of destinies that were friendship becomes all the more important
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a value and a phenomenon to cultivate. So we talked about exiting this family sphere. Where can you
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find these places where friendships can flourish? In the middle ages it's in the case of feminine
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friendships we're talking now about the convents or those parts of monasteries that were reserved
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segregated with women in them and then there would be the courts of early modern Europe and then
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metropolis, Paris and so forth. I'd like to speak about a few of them but before we move on from
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the middle ages could you just give an example of a few feminine friendships that took place
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in the convents and maybe starting with Hildeguard of Bingen and maybe one or two others?
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Well Hildeguard was very attached to one of her younger mentees is what we call them today one of the
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younger nuns and that woman's name, Ricardo's of Fonstata has come down to us in the letters
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that Hildeguard from Bingen wrote after Ricardo's had been sent to become the abbess of another institution
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and Hildeguard was absolutely devastated. She wrote to Ricardo saying daughter listen to me
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my sorrow is destroying the great confidence that I once had mankind. What was to me?
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And why have you forsaken me? This sounds like a love letter. It was a love letter and Hildeguard didn't
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stop there. She wrote to various church authorities saying please send back Ricardo's. She belongs
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in my convent. So over and over again in our study of female friends we found examples of women
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loving each other and expressing that love in the convents even though the church was very wary of what
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they called particular friendships. Hildeguard was also a pen pal of nuns in other convents for
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example Elizabeth of Foncher now who was the abbess of another double monastery and when I say
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double-donisteri I mean that there was a part for the nuns as well as for the monks and they
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Hildeguard and Elizabeth established a friendship through their correspondence
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another pair who are very well known were meshedealed of hackaborn and gertrude who was referred to as
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gertrude the great. They were together in another German cloister where meshedeal told the taught
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the children and she was also known for her singing voice and for almost 40 years meshedealed shared
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the company of two gertrude one was her sister and another was gertrude the great. They chanted the
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liturgy together they read scripture together they worked on their spinning and embroidery they
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took care of the sick and very interesting when meshedealed Foncherborn confided her visions and revelations
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to gertrude the gertrude the great. Her sister nuns prevailed upon meshedealed to write down her
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visions and it was only with the help of her sister nuns that meshedealed's revelations
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found their way into her book of special grace so the nuns were responsible for documenting
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the pronouncements of that visionary and i could give you quite a number of other examples of which
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i do present in the book but do you have a section there will move on from the middle ages but
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you have a section called eamautist acts and i can't not ask you to talk about that because
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clearly there is in many cases what you call a homoerotic dimension to the friendship and that
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this love is kind of promiscuous in terms of its flowing freely across certain categorical boundaries
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so phylia in greek is a good word for that because it means the kind of affection you have a
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family member love you have for a friend or even pets but there's also an erotic
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dimension to some of these friendships in the in the convent is that correct?
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some of them yes but we took the position to resubround and i that there is a whole spectrum
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ranging from at one end what we would call platonic non-carnal friendships two sensual
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friendships and sexual friendships at the other end and we include all of these in our book
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without using terms that wouldn't we don't feel would be appropriate for women of the
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middle ages or even the early modern period we describe them as friends or loving friends or romantic
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friends and we try to be as descriptive as we can be a modest act is the title of a book written
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by a juth brown when she was a professor here at stanford quite a number of years ago and it describes
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the sexual relationship of two nuns in an Italian convent it was a one-foot kind recorded
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right no no i remember juth brown i remember the book quite well so and i think it was well
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said about how you go about describing friendships in the in this period the when you spoke about
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platonic non-carnal friendships that is brings us to one of the arenas for feminine friendship
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that i found particularly fascinating namely lipkistios in pears and we're talking about a few
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couple of centuries a few centuries after hilt hilt the guard obviously but i knew about lipkistios
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only from this kind of vicious parody that you get from molyad in his play lipkistios edi kul
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but i i was persuaded that you know reading your chapter here that um they there was a strong
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at what you call a proto feminist agenda at work in in these founders of the first salons can you
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tell our listeners what the christian who the pearsios were and what the contribution they made
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to the history of feminine friendship well i think of the salon and particularly the one that was
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founded by the makies doramboye as a prototype for all future salon literary groups book clubs
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by women since the seventeenth century and the makies doramboye had weekly salons in pears
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and it was the first where women participated equally with men and where they added to society
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distinctly feminine flavor they'd regular attendees including the future writers um madam to savi nye madam
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dalafe ad man was out of skidiri but also such men as a corne maynage other names that are very
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familiar in the french literary world and one of the things that madam doramboye did was that she
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encouraged all of these people to elevate their speech and their behavior to a level
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considered appropriate for refra fine society so uh what happened is that they did
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avoid words that were vulgar and um sometimes perhaps they used what we would today call you
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for misms but unfortunately molly air's play lay price years we goo love 1661 he'd such
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ridicule upon them that for most friends people today and for you obviously and others
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as soon as they hear the word price years they automatically add the word or any goo while they
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weren't ridiculous if you read their letters and we have extensive volumes of letters and documents
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from this period there we have an embarrassment of riches um you know that they they were friends
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in the real sense of the world that is they were affectionate towards one another they were self
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revelatory they counted on each other for help um madam dolafayat writes to madam to savigne and also to
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maynage the poet asking can you help me find an apartment can you help me find a place in the
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mary because my house in parrots is rented they lend each other money madam dolafayat lent
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money to madam to savigne so that she would have a dowry for her daughter they met almost daily when
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they were in parrots it was in some ways an ideal society of friends and it lasted between madam
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to savigne and madam dolafayat until they died yeah both of them significant authors in their own
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rights no absolutely madam to savigne is known for her letters which uh which comprise at least
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three volumes in the famous prestigious um galle mau addition and um madam dolafayat was of course
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the author of laparancestic lab the princess of cleaves which she published anonymously
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but uh which is in my opinion and in opinion of many others the first psychological novel in the
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western tradition and certainly the most significant French novel of the 17th century um
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but what grew me and was the friendship between these two women a madam to savigne and madam dolafayat
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and at the end of near the end of madam dolafayat's life she writes to madam to savigne saying
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you are the person I have loved the most in all my life she was married she had children she was
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very close with la rush for cool another great French author but when she wrote to madam to savigne
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it was with words that we would associate with love as well as with loving friendship
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so marin dapar from their own friendship my impression is that these sannals that were uh came
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and emerged in in paris at this time which were different from the courts of the royal courts or
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the high aristocratic courts where you had ladies with their entourage where you write about that as
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well that's another kind of arena for friendship where friendships extra familial friendships were able to
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occur but here I think there's some innovations and tell me if I get this wrong but I think it's
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the first time that something like a friendship between a man and a woman can actually take place
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in a sannal by that I mean a friendship which is not necessarily based on erotic desire or courtship
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but is mon ami, chimon ami, ami, there were a great deal of men included among these women
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no yes absolutely and the women had friendships with men as savigne and la fayette had with the poet
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minaj which lasted to the end of their lives what was different was that the women set the tone
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and you could be a member of the sannal only if you respected the fact that women were at least
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the equal of men in these sannal and this is so interesting because in France that tradition lasted
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into the 20th century if you were a male writer and you wanted to make it in French society
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you had to be invited by a woman in the 17th or the 18th or the 19th or the 20th century into one of
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these sannal so the women were exercising power they were the gatekeepers to how one's book becomes
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launched and there is no doubt about it that real friendships developed around what we would think of
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as books literary questions philosophical questions and it was if not unique one can always find an earlier
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predecessor in France or in Italy for example but it was such a social phenomenon that it took
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hold in France it drifted into the provinces it drifted into other European countries I mean we
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still speak today about sannal I know of someone in San Francisco who has a sannal I have a literary
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sannal for women which was inspired by a former professor of English at Stanford Diane Middlebrook
|
| 00:30:43.040 |
when ran it together before she died and she was the inspiration for this book well maybe entitled
|
| 00:30:49.680 |
opinions is a sannal and it's own right you know a place of discussion and a place of friendship yeah I
|
| 00:30:55.360 |
have to say that in the modern period France has done more than any other culture to civilize
|
| 00:31:02.080 |
the West in the in the sphere of culture and the role that these women that we're talking about
|
| 00:31:10.000 |
it played in that civilizing process where to begin with the price of admission is that you
|
| 00:31:16.000 |
have to respect women at least as much as as the men and that they weren't there just to promote
|
| 00:31:24.240 |
the works of male writers they were also there to encourage each other to become literary to
|
| 00:31:30.080 |
write to find find the sources of self-expression and take up their own voices at the same time
|
| 00:31:36.880 |
can you say a few words about Mademoiselle this scudie is that her name yes Mademoiselle
|
| 00:31:44.160 |
scudie who wrote mega bestsellers in the 17th century and she was not wealthy she didn't have
|
| 00:31:55.920 |
the background the money the power that Mademoiselle and Mademoiselle have had so all the more
|
| 00:32:05.200 |
reason to admire the fact that she was invited to the salon of the Marquis d'Orangbé
|
| 00:32:13.840 |
Baguié and that she founded her own salon that included even bourgeois women and when she went on
|
| 00:32:23.600 |
to write these when I say mega novels they were five and ten volumes and nobody reads them anymore
|
| 00:32:32.400 |
today because they're too long and they're too price years but she did describe some of the salon and
|
| 00:32:43.440 |
some of the people who were part of the women's salon she did not use their names she she used
|
| 00:32:52.160 |
assumed names very precious assumed names absolutely and but she raises some of the questions about
|
| 00:33:00.320 |
friendship that are very important throughout history and that is can you have too many friends
|
| 00:33:06.560 |
if you're friendly to everyone it does that mean that your friendships mean anything and think
|
| 00:33:14.720 |
about today's internet friendships where people have 250 or 300 so-called friends well what does
|
| 00:33:22.560 |
that mean if you water it down to that extent what she raises issues like that and she raises she
|
| 00:33:29.360 |
uses the word amity of course which by then took on a much greater meaning it could also mean love
|
| 00:33:34.960 |
sure so the boundaries between friendship and love are very blurred she was quite an amazing
|
| 00:33:41.840 |
woman she never married she earned her living from her pen she had a great she had an important
|
| 00:33:50.240 |
circle of friends and they supported each other in many many ways yeah and you also point out that
|
| 00:33:58.000 |
although at originally it was the aristocracy you had to have a title but that there it was not
|
| 00:34:03.440 |
hierarchical in the sense that Madan des Scudier he was not a rich woman she was actually
|
| 00:34:08.480 |
quite modest in her means but she could be befriended as an equal by in the Khanda Matkes
|
| 00:34:17.760 |
and it was it was their with their literary intelligence their
|
| 00:34:27.200 |
manner of being that they they were admitted as friends on criteria of things other than social
|
| 00:34:34.080 |
rank only you're absolutely right I can't emphasize that more the boundaries of class as later on
|
| 00:34:45.760 |
the boundaries of race are very often maintained in friendships it's hard to cross those boundaries
|
| 00:34:53.600 |
but at least in the literary world there were people who were not of the aristocracy and who
|
| 00:35:01.600 |
were received into the so-called best circles so when you speak about France I mean I am an avid
|
| 00:35:09.360 |
francophile and it is because of this tradition that I found in France of literature and art
|
| 00:35:19.760 |
and a general civilized culture that what can speak of friendships that do cross
|
| 00:35:27.120 |
class and that I hope are still vibrant in France today yeah now it's skipping just a little bit
|
| 00:35:37.760 |
you have a chapter that interests me also in particular on romantic friendships and here romantic
|
| 00:35:43.760 |
doesn't mean like romance but it means the romantic peer that they take place during what we call
|
| 00:35:48.480 |
romanticism and can you say a few words about romantic friendship what does romanticism
|
| 00:35:56.000 |
do to to how does it decline the feminine friendships in this particular period
|
| 00:36:03.680 |
the public face of feminine friendship really takes off around 1800 and of course we're speaking
|
| 00:36:14.560 |
about the romantic period in in the west and Nancy caught the American historian when she writes about
|
| 00:36:24.400 |
the bonds of womanhood she suggests that from the late and 18th century through the mid 19th century
|
| 00:36:32.480 |
there's a newly self-conscious concept of female friendship that is equated with love
|
| 00:36:42.800 |
empathy the emotions and the emotions come to the fore in romanticism particularly in the pre-romantic
|
| 00:36:52.480 |
and romantic movements and literature between 1761 I give that date as a starting point because
|
| 00:37:00.640 |
it's the date of Rousseau's new El Wies, La Nouvele Louise and the 1770s, Agerta's
|
| 00:37:11.280 |
sorrows of young Vertere so when we think of the 18th century we often think first of the enlightenment
|
| 00:37:19.840 |
and reason but at the same time you get this nascent focus on sensibility emotions love and ultimately
|
| 00:37:33.520 |
on friendship and like love affairs romantic friendships take off for women at this period
|
| 00:37:41.440 |
often initiated in in adolescence we begin to see in the particularly in the early 19th century
|
| 00:37:51.280 |
autobiography where women talk about the crushes they have on each other I think of
|
| 00:37:58.240 |
Georges Sal and her eastward Mavie she talks about the great love she had for other girls and even
|
| 00:38:08.560 |
for the nuns in the convent school where she went and she describes the rituals that these girls
|
| 00:38:16.640 |
established where you made a list of who your best friend was this doesn't sound so far from what
|
| 00:38:22.480 |
goes on in middle schools today and if you said Joanna was your best friend and she was number one on
|
| 00:38:31.120 |
the list you couldn't change that so it is we see these kind of rituals that get established in the
|
| 00:38:38.480 |
early 19th century and what was called romantic friendships the first time I ran across that term
|
| 00:38:47.040 |
was in a letter about the women who became known as the ladies of Langachlan these were two Irish
|
| 00:38:55.120 |
women who ran off together to Wales in the late 18th century they wanted to live together of course
|
| 00:39:02.640 |
their families thought that this was unacceptable and got brought them back but in one of the
|
| 00:39:10.080 |
letters about this a family member says well it was only a romantic friendship no gentlemen were
|
| 00:39:17.120 |
involved and so that was not a disgrace for the family in the end the two women were allowed to
|
| 00:39:23.760 |
go off and live together in Wales and they became iconic figures even written about in words
|
| 00:39:31.520 |
where it's poetry so there is an acceptance that women love one another but as early in this early 19th
|
| 00:39:41.360 |
century it's assumed that their love is quote pure or chased and we continue to see expressions of these
|
| 00:39:50.640 |
romantic friendships all through the 19th century including well one of the ones I write about
|
| 00:39:58.240 |
in the book is the friendship of Adele Schopenhauer and her good friend Sybil Merton's a married woman
|
| 00:40:07.200 |
who had six children and Adele was a single woman she was the sister I have to say unfortunately
|
| 00:40:16.320 |
of Arthur Schopenhauer why unfortunately well he was such a misogynist but then of course
|
| 00:40:23.520 |
he didn't get on with men or women so women or men let's put it this way Adele's relationship with
|
| 00:40:32.320 |
Sybil was the great love of her life the great friendship of her life they spent time in
|
| 00:40:40.960 |
born in Germany in Cologne during the winter Sybil also ran a salo and she and well the two of them
|
| 00:40:56.160 |
formed such a friendship that they went to Italy together and when Sybil's husband died
|
| 00:41:05.120 |
Adele and Sybil could live together more openly and when Adele was dying Sybil took care of her
|
| 00:41:14.720 |
she saw that she had her medicines she put flowers by her bed she died she did what women always do
|
| 00:41:22.880 |
for others who are sick they take care of their family members they take care of their parents they
|
| 00:41:30.720 |
take care of their children and they take care of their friends so that that great friendship
|
| 00:41:37.040 |
has come down in history although it's not very well known but it produced something that I have
|
| 00:41:45.680 |
never seen elsewhere and that is a tombstone that Sybil erected and put in the cemetery in
|
| 00:41:54.640 |
Bonn she wrote it in Italian by the way because the Italy was the great meeting place for the two
|
| 00:42:01.120 |
women it's a testimonial to their friendship and she wrote on the tombstone here lies
|
| 00:42:09.280 |
well the long name of a girl's soap and hauer after a life of 52 years outstanding in heart
|
| 00:42:19.520 |
spirit talent the best of daughter and true to her friends this monument was erected by her
|
| 00:42:27.680 |
inconsolable friend Sybil Mertens, Shalfhausen I've never seen that anywhere else and if anyone
|
| 00:42:37.760 |
listening to this program sees a tombstone that has been erected by a friend to another friend
|
| 00:42:44.960 |
in the 19th and even 20th century please let me know where is the tomb Marilyn the tomb is in the
|
| 00:42:52.480 |
old Bonn cemetery, old Bonn cemetery because there is the famous tomb of Keats obviously in the
|
| 00:42:58.640 |
Protestant cemetery of Rome and that was done by his friend John Severin but he doesn't declare
|
| 00:43:06.160 |
himself as a friend he just speaks of Keats dying in the bitterness of his enemies and wishing these
|
| 00:43:16.240 |
words to be engraven on his tombstone here lies one whose name was written in water it's obvious
|
| 00:43:22.080 |
obvious that only a friend could have created a you know a headstone like that for another friend
|
| 00:43:30.320 |
although it's naturally not in the words that we read on the headstone as such so well I know Robert
|
| 00:43:38.400 |
you and I have a very special interest in cemetery and I am certainly familiar as you are too with
|
| 00:43:47.520 |
the many many American gravestones that don't even give him give the wife a name she's a man's name
|
| 00:43:54.800 |
is there and then you say his wife or sometimes his wife and the name is there but in my many years
|
| 00:44:02.080 |
of looking at tombstones I was struck when I ran across this one it is unique for sure
|
| 00:44:08.960 |
Marilyn I'm going to give our listeners a little sense of the scope of your book because we've
|
| 00:44:14.880 |
jumped from one chapter to another but here just from the table of contents so you have those
|
| 00:44:21.520 |
first opening chapters on friendship in the Bible and then another one on philosophers and clerks
|
| 00:44:28.000 |
which we're talking about antiquity and then so we have pre-modern nuns we talked about that
|
| 00:44:32.400 |
gossips and soulmates we didn't talk about that precious ladies talked about that patriotic
|
| 00:44:37.600 |
friendships we skipped ice gift to talk about romantic friendships and then you have a chapter
|
| 00:44:43.600 |
called quilt pray club and then college girls city girls and new women and the new woman I'm sorry
|
| 00:44:52.400 |
and then Eleanor Roosevelt and her friends then from couplehood to sisterhood and then in the last
|
| 00:44:59.520 |
section friend to missy give and take friendship in a market economy can women and men be just
|
| 00:45:06.400 |
friends and finally an epilogue called female friendship what in jurors and we're not going to
|
| 00:45:11.680 |
cover all those bases but just chapter 10 Eleanor Roosevelt and her friends really stands out as
|
| 00:45:18.000 |
an item of curiosity and I have to say your book was so engrossing that I saw I felt like I
|
| 00:45:23.120 |
couldn't skip any of these sections without losing something interesting so I haven't actually
|
| 00:45:29.760 |
gotten to the end of it because we decided to do this so just a few days ago I haven't read the
|
| 00:45:36.240 |
chapter on Eleanor Roosevelt and her friends so I curious what does it deal with and who were her
|
| 00:45:43.680 |
friends I didn't intend to write a chapter about Eleanor Roosevelt until one of my friends took me
|
| 00:45:51.760 |
aside the husband of a very very close friend and he said you must write about Eleanor Roosevelt
|
| 00:45:58.640 |
and I tried not to but then I started to read the letters that Eleanor and her first of all her very
|
| 00:46:09.760 |
closest first friend had written to one another and then the other collections of letters
|
| 00:46:18.800 |
throughout her life then the biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt and I discovered that her friends
|
| 00:46:26.160 |
had really been midwives to the person she became after she had married her husband and after she had
|
| 00:46:37.120 |
had six children within the first ten years of her marriage and after she was shocked to discover in
|
| 00:46:45.120 |
1918 that Franklin had been having an affair with her own social secretary she was totally
|
| 00:46:53.600 |
devastated she was at such a low point in her life that it was really only her friendships that pulled
|
| 00:47:05.200 |
her through and what I discovered is that somehow in the 1920s she became friends with a two or four
|
| 00:47:17.280 |
really four different women who were what we called then new women that is independent women
|
| 00:47:24.160 |
who were living either alone or in couples in Granite village some of them were graduates of Smith
|
| 00:47:32.160 |
and Wellesley my own alma mater that is women's colleges and when Eleanor began to know these women
|
| 00:47:42.640 |
and to go and visit with them and to read poetry with them and to dine alone with them during the 1920s
|
| 00:47:51.280 |
and she began to get interested in politics and democratic politics in the League of Women voters
|
| 00:47:59.040 |
the world court and this really brought her out of what we today might have called it
|
| 00:48:08.880 |
the oppression the historian
|
| 00:48:12.880 |
Darris Curren's Goodwin has said that she talks about the four women
|
| 00:48:17.840 |
played a substantial role in the education of Eleanor Roosevelt they tutored her in politics
|
| 00:48:26.560 |
and they encouraged to open herself up emotionally so it was these women who acted as midwives
|
| 00:48:36.160 |
to the person we now think of as Eleanor Roosevelt what's more they did two very interesting things
|
| 00:48:44.320 |
together they formed a school where Eleanor taught English and history and they created a company
|
| 00:49:01.200 |
called the Val kill industries where they tried to revive local handicrafts and
|
| 00:49:08.160 |
Eleanor was very active in these kind of endeavors and she said herself that she thought that
|
| 00:49:20.240 |
shared activities was one of the best ways for women to form friendships and she did that
|
| 00:49:30.480 |
right up to well really the end of her life so that her friendships form such an important
|
| 00:49:43.600 |
period such an important part of her life that once I got into it it was very easy to write an
|
| 00:49:49.120 |
entire chapter about her now of course sometimes there were moments of strain and misunderstanding
|
| 00:49:57.360 |
inner friendships and I write about that in addition Eleanor had some very very important male friendships
|
| 00:50:06.240 |
and she had one friendship that is still a subject of intense debate amongst Eleanor's historians
|
| 00:50:16.720 |
and that is her friendship with Lorena Hick also called Hick who was a journalist and a journalist
|
| 00:50:27.120 |
with whom Eleanor had a very passionate relationship as early as 1932 she was a very tall woman weighing
|
| 00:50:38.240 |
200 pounds she was from a working-class family she had a very very difficult family history
|
| 00:50:47.760 |
and but she became indispensable to Eleanor it was Hick who suggested Eleanor that she
|
| 00:50:55.120 |
hold weekly news conferences with the press and that the reporters be limited to women and one of the things
|
| 00:51:04.800 |
that intrigued me the most was that in July 1933 Eleanor and Hick managed to take a road trip
|
| 00:51:15.120 |
together I'm thinking of that in particular because of the introduction about thelma and the wheeze
|
| 00:51:25.120 |
and they went off together to New York to New England and to French Canada and I can you imagine today
|
| 00:51:31.280 |
a first lady of the United States driving her own car in this case a blue Buick convertible
|
| 00:51:40.080 |
and she didn't have any security agents and that's exactly what Eleanor and Hick did
|
| 00:51:47.600 |
for three weeks and when they returned to the White House because by then Franklin was in the White
|
| 00:51:56.080 |
House he quickly scheduled a private dinner so that they could tell him all about their adventures
|
| 00:52:04.160 |
Eleanor and Hick sometimes found opportunities to work together on causes concerning the underprivileged
|
| 00:52:14.000 |
and they exchanged dozens and dozens hundreds of letters that are now today in the Roosevelt library
|
| 00:52:22.720 |
and the rhetoric in these letters is exactly the rhetoric of romantic friendships I miss you I love you
|
| 00:52:31.600 |
with all my heart I love you and of course this has lent itself to various interpretations
|
| 00:52:39.840 |
by feminist scholars today yeah Maryland time for one more of your chapters briefly and I guess
|
| 00:52:50.640 |
I'm going to choose can women and men be just friends because I haven't read that one either
|
| 00:52:56.160 |
and I don't want to yes or no answer to it but just what is the problem there about it can women
|
| 00:53:02.640 |
and men be just friends well just friends has a special resonance today does it not
|
| 00:53:13.040 |
in a time when people very often move quickly into sex and so when two people speak about
|
| 00:53:26.640 |
their friendship and they say we're just friends it means that they're not having sex we wrote that
|
| 00:53:34.800 |
chapter it was mostly the work of Teresa starting with a film that many of you perhaps remember
|
| 00:53:44.560 |
and that was Harry and Sally when Harry met Sally that iconic film from the 1980s I think it was
|
| 00:53:55.920 |
late 1980s and Harry of course takes the position that women and men cannot be friends because the sex
|
| 00:54:04.640 |
thing gets in the way as he puts it and Sally takes the position you know well of course we
|
| 00:54:11.760 |
can be friends with men she does somewhat change her mind by the end of the film but essentially
|
| 00:54:19.120 |
men and women are taking different positions in that film on whether men and women can be friends
|
| 00:54:27.440 |
now we've seen as far back as well the past years that men and women can be friends and more
|
| 00:54:38.000 |
and more in the 20th century as women are taking on roles that men would have had exclusively
|
| 00:54:47.280 |
in the past that is to say in the military that men and women singles and couples
|
| 00:54:54.160 |
LGBT and straight people are part of friendship groups and gender is becoming we think less and less
|
| 00:55:08.640 |
significant in these friendships in college friendships in work friendships in sports friendships
|
| 00:55:17.840 |
I mean after all title nine did pave the way for women to enter into sports in a big way and
|
| 00:55:24.320 |
sometimes they're on the same teams with men or with boys increasingly as women join traditionally
|
| 00:55:31.760 |
male professions as equals and they find work they find workplace friends of either gender
|
| 00:55:38.480 |
so you know we think that co-ed means boys and girls together and many campuses allow male and female
|
| 00:55:47.920 |
students well to share the same dormitory certainly that was the case it has been the case at Stanford
|
| 00:55:56.720 |
strangely enough we find that men naturally gravitate toward women
|
| 00:56:08.400 |
as their best friends often if a guy marries in this day well I don't know how often but if a guy
|
| 00:56:18.240 |
marries he might ask a woman to be his best man or to be one of his best grooms men grooms women
|
| 00:56:33.200 |
but it doesn't seem to work in the other direction that women are not necessarily asking men
|
| 00:56:42.560 |
to be to stand up for them at their wedding so there's a lot of interesting stuff going on today
|
| 00:56:50.800 |
in that cross-gender friendships I should also point out that there was a period particularly in the
|
| 00:57:00.400 |
80s where ugly terms like fag hags turned up and that is women developing intense friendships close
|
| 00:57:12.480 |
friendships with gay men so a lot is changing particularly in the last I would say 20 years
|
| 00:57:26.000 |
where we see more and more cross-gender friendships one thing we like to say over and over again
|
| 00:57:36.640 |
is that something a long-term friendships because it's an added to that I remember it as a girl
|
| 00:57:48.160 |
meet new friends keep the old one is silver and the other gold and there is something very special
|
| 00:57:57.520 |
about the friends that you had either in childhood or in college or in early adulthood
|
| 00:58:03.760 |
and I say this to younger people all the time hold on to them don't let them go they become
|
| 00:58:11.440 |
increasingly valuable to you as witnesses of your life as you get older and older
|
| 00:58:19.440 |
not only witnesses there's a kind of power of bonding in youth that I think we can
|
| 00:58:25.760 |
considerably you know later in life and that the intensity and longevity of certain friendships
|
| 00:58:32.320 |
it's remarkable how especially in America in the college years those seem to be the friendships that
|
| 00:58:40.480 |
have a lasting power even more than previous high school or grade school friendships and
|
| 00:58:47.360 |
holding on is important and regarding you know the gender thing I mean if I say some of my best
|
| 00:58:58.320 |
friends are women I'm using an expression that's dubious because that has always been invoked for
|
| 00:59:05.120 |
other things but I think there's a way in which that I would like to propose that it not be flattened
|
| 00:59:14.640 |
out that at a certain point men and women can be friends equally and in a neutrally regardless of
|
| 00:59:22.960 |
gender but that there's a special quality of male female friendships that has yet to be cultivated
|
| 00:59:32.320 |
to his full potential that would make for a very different kind of friendship ideally I would I would
|
| 00:59:38.560 |
suggest then that you know just between men and men or between women and women and that this third
|
| 00:59:46.880 |
way is important to keep open in this possibilities because it would include elements
|
| 00:59:52.880 |
that have to do with the ambiguity of can we be just friends and so forth that would that would
|
| 00:59:59.200 |
maybe enhance the possibilities of you know holding converse on the level of ideas and coming to each
|
| 01:00:07.520 |
others anytime some need and so forth. That's very lovely Robert I really appreciate that
|
| 01:00:13.760 |
you always make me think beyond what I have proposed in a book and thought about for a very long
|
| 01:00:22.240 |
time the idea that there would be something special in the future and that we're creating right
|
| 01:00:28.960 |
now. I believe so yeah and here we go you and me friends very good friends so thanks again Marilyn
|
| 01:00:37.760 |
for coming on in title opinions we've been speaking with Marilyn Yalom the book is the social
|
| 01:00:44.240 |
sex a history of feminine friendship I think you've got a very good flavor of what's in there
|
| 01:00:50.400 |
and I hope you'll all go and read it. Thanks again Marilyn. Thank you Robert I'm Robert Harrison
|
| 01:00:55.840 |
for in title opinions bye bye
|
| 01:01:05.840 |
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