Still passionate about friends

Off Our Backs, Jan 1999 by Douglas, Carol Anne

Interviewing Janice Raymond reminded me of her wonderful book A Passion for Friends, which inspires me still as much as it did when it was published in the early '80s. It has also inspired many Women's Studies students I have taught, and I strongly recommend reading it if you never have.

Raymond pointed out the importance of women being friends to each other, despite all the obstacles that patriarchy puts in our way that make us seem not lovable to each other. Women's friendships have been devalued; we are not supposed to center our lives on them. Women's friendships also can be profoundly political, Raymond wrote. In order to live as feminists, we need friends and community that support our values and help us to develop and maintain them.

Friendships develop in many ways. I just spent Thanksgiving with an ex-lover, her lover, and their daughter, who are my good friends, and I plan to spend Christmas Eve with, another exlover and her lover. Most of my closest friends are women I was once in love with. Th process of transforming from being in love to being a friend was generally not entirely smooth, sometimes far from it, but always very worth the effort because the women I have fallen in love with were..women I liked profoundly and had much in common with. In some cases, I was not able to be entirely comfortable with ex-lover until I was established in a good lover relationship with someone else. So the process has taken years, but any friendship takes years to develop.

We need to be patient with friends, to be attentive to where they are at a particular time, not to try to force our own wishes on them. Not that this is easy -- it has taken me fifty-two years of living to gain some skill at this. Each friendship has its own rhythms, and those rhythms change somewhat over the years. Some friends move away but stay close, while others stay in town but change the patterns of their lives, such as by having children.

Change isn't easy for me -- as one of my friends once noted, I want to spend my life always doing the same things with the same people (once I found the feminist movement, joined off our backs, and came out as a lesbian, I knew just what I wanted). Nevertheless, friendship habits can change in ways that work if both people care enough and have enough patience. One close friend moved out of town a decade ago, but we communicate every few weeks on the telephone, see each other about once a year, and are as close as ever.

Long-distance friendships are common for many feminists, particularly academics who have to move in order to get jobs in their field. Loneliness is a fact of life for many who have their closest friends and political cronies in distant places. Mary Daly calls this "diaspora" in her new book, Quintessence.

Close friendships are vital for sharing our feelings and helping us understand them. Lesbian feminists often realize this because our families of origin and friends from our past have failed to understand us and our movement. Our friends and our lovers (who are our friends) are the center of our lives. Yet we do not always make friendship central or treat friends as carefully as we treat our biological families. We do not always see our friendships as long-term institutions that will go through phases and have troubles. Sometimes we will be annoyed, sometimes we will be hurt. But if we respect each other and have a little patience, the friendship may well emerge stronger than ever.

If we are honest, we will need to admit, at least to ourselves, that we sometimes hurt our friends or try their patience; it isn't always the friend who hurts or aggravates us. I still find myself not always treating friends as well as I know I should.

But not all friends are close friends. There are colleagues in the movement -- what we used to call "sisters" and I still would like to -- both near and far. And there is an attitude of friendship that we can have to women we don't know.

As Raymond notes in her interview, we have not always been friends to other feminists. Not all feminists will like each other, but that is a different matter. We many times have failed to respect each other, have expected each other to work endlessly with little recognition, have been suspicious of each other's motives, have trashed each other, have patronized each other, have misrepresented each other's ideas. Who would feel comfortable saying, "The feminist movement is friendly"? Sometimes some feminist groups are friendly, but even that isn't easy. It's hard to be welcoming while working feverishly to survive.

But how could we exist as feminists without the friendship of women we don't know? The writings, organizations, networks, and art of other women keep us going, help us understand our lives, and help us do our own feminist work. Just knowing that other feminists are "out there" helps immeasurably.

Being a friend to women is very demanding. A friend to women must be concerned about all women, not just those who are most like herself. A friend to women must be concerned about all violence against women and all economic oppression, not just live in her own world without trying in some way (perhaps never enough) to work against violence and poverty. A friend to women must want all voices to be heard, not just her own.