A Passion for Friends

Women.

Other books by Janice Raymond:

The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male

Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle over Women’s Freedom

Legitimating Prostitution as Sex Work: UN Labour Organization (ILO) Calls for Recognition of the Sex Industry

RU486: Misconceptions, Myths and Morals (co-author)

JANICE G.RAYMOND

A PASSION FOR FRIENDS

TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY OF FEMALE AFFECTION

Spinifex Press Pty Ltd

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First published by Beacon Press, 1986

This edition published by Spinifex Press, 2001

Copyright © by Janice G.Raymond, 1986

Copyright on Preface © 2001

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Cover design by Deb Snibson

Made and printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Raymond, Janice G.

A passion for friends: toward a philosophy of female affection.

2nd ed.

Bibliography.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-74219-147-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 978-1-74219-449-3 (ePub Format)

ISBN 1 876756 08 X.

1. Female friendship. 2. Women—Psychology 3. Interpersonal relations. 4. Feminism. I. Title.

158.25082

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for the permission to reprint: to Alix Dobkin, for the excerpt from The Woman in Your Life is You, from the album Lavendar Jane Loves Women, Ladyslipper Music, P.O.Box 3130, Durham, NC; lines from A Letter by Shao Fei-fei, To the Tune of ‘Flowers Along The Path Through the Field’ by Wu Tsao, To the Tune The River is Red’ and Two Poems to the Tune ‘Narcissus by the River’ by Ch’iu Chin, from Women Poets of China translated and edited by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung, © 1972 by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung, used by permission of Bradford Morrow for the Kenneth Rexroth Trust and New Directions Publishing Corporation; for the excerpt from Women’s Rights by Jiu Jin from Feminism and Socialism in China by Elisabeth Croll, by permission of Routledge and Kegan Paul, copyright © 1972; to The Journal of the China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, XXXIII, for the excerpt from Song of the Southern Sea; from The Space from Views from the Intersection by Catherine Barry, by permission of the author; and from In Search of a Warm Feminist by Joan Schwartz, by permission of the author.

For Pat Hynes

who makes these words flesh

The journey would have been pleasant in most

circumstances, and interesting in any, but

because you were there it was wholly delightful…

"Our actions all have immortality;

Such gladness gives no hostage

unto death."

Thank you, thank you, thank you, for being so

completely satisfactory, you most sweet woman.

And we will go again. There are heaps of

lovely places to see and things to do. Never

doubt that I want to see and do them, and that

I ask no better travelling companion than you.

Winifred Holtby to Vera Brittain,

Testament of Friendship

Contents

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are always a difficult task. On the one hand, they give the author a chance to thank individuals whose support and work have been crucial to the book’s development; on the other hand, acknowledgements do not thank enough or adequately those who are acknowledged or describe their precise role in the gestation of the work.

Having said this, however, I would like to acknowledge many who have been helpful, in various ways, over the course of these last six years of writing. For suggestions, readings, tracking down references and other materials, and often for sharing their own work, I thank Marcia Lieberman, Ann Dellenbaugh, Ann Woodhull, Fern Johnson, Denice Yanni, Nancy Richard, Kathy Newman, Elaine Koenig, and Leila Ahmed. Thanks to Sandra Elkin, my agent. Many thanks to Joanne Wyckoff, my editor, for shaping up this book in different ways, and to Barbara Flanagan for a careful and creative copyediting. Julie Melrose dauntlessly read the proofs of this book aloud with me. Charlie Virga, an old friend, helped me put this work in an international context.

My parents have always supported and encouraged my work, even when they have disagreed with some of it. I have been fortunate in the friendship of many women, both new and old friends, whose lives confirm that the ideas in this book have a personal and political reality: Aunt Mae, Wilma Miley, Linda Scaparotti, Marlene Fine, Kathy Alexander, Gena Corea, Emily Culpepper, Kate Lehmann, Linda Barufaldi, Karin Krut, Susan Yarbrough, and Eileen Barrett. For those friends of many years ago in the Sisters of Mercy who were true companions of the soul, I am grateful.

The courage, work, and friendship of Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan, and Kathy Barry have been a source of inspiration and strength to me. They remind me that radical feminism lives and thrives and that female friendship is indeed personal and political. My additional thanks to Kathy Barry for her reading and suggestions on the manuscript. Nelle Morton’s spirit and work continue to affect my own.

Mary Daly’s vision, work, and friendship have been enspiriting and encouraging for many years. Her Self and her work have always taught me that thinking is where I keep the company of my Self; where I find my original friend, so to speak.

Renate Klein’s friendship has been truly Gyn/affective. Her careful and intelligent reading of this entire work was invaluable. Her attentiveness to the daily and detailed ways of friendship have gladdened not only my life but the lives of hundreds of women worldwide who have passed through her doors.

Preface

In 1980 when I began writing A Passion for Friends, feminists were not talking much about women’s friendships. It was almost as if we thought that feminism itself, automatically made us friends. This assumption, as many of us learned, was rather naive. Like others, feminists do not automatically become friends. Although feminists believed and stated that the personal is political, conversely the political was not always personal—i.e., a sisterhood that was created in the struggle for women’s liberation did not mean that feminists shared a common world beyond the struggle. We did not necessarily share a space where friendship could occur and thrive.

This reprinting of A Passion for Friends takes place on the fifteenth anniversary of its original publication in 1986. Many of the reasons why I wrote the book are still important today: the invisibility of a tradition of female friendship; the quest to unearth a history of women’s friendship that would affirm that women alone (without men) are women together; the recognition that women have always been each other’s best friends, supporters and benefactors without ignoring the obstacles placed in the way of women’s continuing friendships with other women; and the possibilities generated by female friendship for a shared personal, social, political and economic future for women.

Another purpose in writing A Passion for Friends was to articulate a philosophy of female friendship. Historically, the philosophy of friendship has been characterized by lofty male-centered ideas, as expressed by the philosophers of male friendship such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Emerson and Montaigne. These ideas resonated in the realms of power and, in the Greek philosophical tradition, friendship became the basis of the state. Less known is that female friendship historically has invested women with personal and socioeconomic power, going far beyond the societies of consolation that women’s friendships have been depicted, at best, to be.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, western feminism was riven by political divisions, particularly among feminists in the United States, the U.K., and Australia. One of the divisions was between radical feminists and socialist feminists. By and large, it was socialist feminists who got to define the divisions, since it was they who ended up in institutionalized and secure positions in universities. They generated most of the syllabi, reading lists, and typologies of feminism through which generations of college students came to identify acceptable and unacceptable feminism. For many years, feminist theory in particular was taught by the brands of feminism approach where specific trends and philosophies of feminism were encrusted in typologies. It seems not to have dawned on feminist scholars that just as the rest of the academy was giving up on typologies, Women’s Studies began embracing this method of teaching and learning what feminism is/was all about.

During these unsettling years, I ranted in Women’s Studies curriculum committee meetings and to my students about the fallacies of the brands of feminism approach. I particularly scorned typologies of radical feminism, always defined by the non-radically feminist, in which radical feminism was labelled ontological, essentialist, simplistic, cultural and apolitical, and as a feminism focused mainly on women’s victimization. The reception of radical feminist theory and activism, largely by once-upon-a-time socialist feminists now turned postmodernist, has been to classify rather than engage with radical feminist thinking.

In the typologies of feminist theory, radical feminism is written about as having meager theoretic grounding. This is largely because the other dominant white paradigms of feminism, namely liberal, socialist, Marxist, and postmodernist—derive their theories from male philosophical traditions that, in turn, authorize them. Catharine MacKinnon has coined the term, feminism unmodified for a feminism unqualified by preexisting modifiers.

It was my goal in A Passion for Friends to focus on female friendship unmodified, i.e., to examine the ideas and practices of women’s friendships which were independent of men and that placed women at the center of relational existence. But further, I wanted to excavate and analyze female friendship that had social, political, and/or economic purpose beyond the friendship itself. That goal is as relevant today as it was in the 1980s.

Since A Passion for Friends was published in 1986, the vibrancy of the international women’s movement has given new meaning to women’s friendships. In my own life, international feminist advocacy and women’s human rights activism around new reproductive technologies and more recently focused on sex trafficking, prostitution and other forms of violence against women have emerged from international friendship networks with women in different parts of the globe. Just as surely, the globalization of female friendship has emerged from the advocacy and activism itself.

Much of the feminist organizing that I have been engaged in over the past decade—opposing the globalization of the sex industry and the creeping legalization/regulation of prostitution as sex work where pimps are redefined as third party business agents—transforms female friendship into international policies, national and regional legislation, and institutional viability. And it also transforms feminist organizing into female friendships. The policy and institutions we create acquire not only institutional memory but result in effective institutional structure—and give our ideas and friendships consequence in the world. In the absence of political transformation, female friendship remains personal.

A growing involvement in international womanpower—coalitions, networks, meetings, actions, organizing, conferences, and forums underpins the feminist friendships of the new millennium. The possibilities of a female friendship without boundaries is the hope of this new edition of A Passion for Friends.

March, 2001

Introduction

I like the word affection, because it signifies something habitual.

Mary Wollstonecraft

I have a passion for friends.

Socrates in Plato

Lysis

Philosophising is a process of making sense out of experience.

Suzanne Langer

Philosophical Sketches

…but I say that whatever one loves, is.

Sappho,

from Sappho, a new translation

This is a book about women together. Women together are not women alone.

Hetero-reality, the world view that woman exists always in relation to man, has consistently perceived women together as women alone. Many versions of this hetero-reality assault women in our everyday lives. Lily Tomlin, with her usual wit, makes light¹ of one version: I’ve actually seen a man walk up to four women sitting in a bar and say: ‘Hey, what are you doing here sitting all alone?’² The perception is that women without men are women without company or companionship.

Or, consider the example of two women who go out to eat in a restaurant. A half-hour passes and they have not been waited on. They watch people—men and women together—who came in after them get served. When they tell the attendant that they’ve been waiting a long time, she or he says, Oh, I didn’t see you! The perception is that women together are invisible—therefore, not perceived.

A third version of hetero-reality appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine several years ago in an article entitled In Praise of Old Nantucket. It was written by a woman, and much of it was devoted to the history of the island, particularly its whaling history. The author told how Nantucket men went away on fishing voyages, often for several years at a time. She also recounted the rich intellectual and social pursuits in which the island women became involved. Out of this island whaling era came some exceptional women: Lucretia Mott, the famous nineteenth-century feminist; Maria Mitchell, the remarkable astronomer; and other women who went back and forth between the island and the mainland to engage in religious, abolitionist, and feminist activities. Associations of island women were formed and grew in numbers. However, the author offered this summation of the wealth of women’s activity: "But women left alone could not have been altogether happy" (Italics mine).³ Her perception was that women’s activities produce less than happy women. And even when women are engaged in the richest of pursuits, they are impoverished if men are not involved. This sentence would never be written about men’s groups that historically were engaged in political, intellectual, and social activities in which no women were involved.

I offer a final version of hetero-reality that appeared in a 1984 review of Simone de Beauvoir’s book Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, which is about the last years of Jean-Paul Sartre’s life:

[Simone de Beauvoir] was the permanent personal factor in [Sartre’s] life…without her Sartre would have been a different person. But as has often been said, Sartre would always have been Sartre all the same. His life followed its own trail and its own logic. Simone de Beauvoir without Sartre is difficult to imagine… Whatever her skills as a writer or her own role as courageous supporter of many causes, she can only be assessed in relation to the Sartrian universe.⁴

The perception here is that women together with their work follow no trail or logic of their own. No matter how brilliant or creative a woman’s work is, it can only be assessed in relation to brilliant men. Or, quite simply from the point of view of hetero-relational vision, women’s work, like woman herself, is perceived as derivative.

But there is another point of view and another vision—that of female friendship. Virginia Woolf tells us how she searched for a tradition of female friendship in literature—those unsaid or half-said words, which form themselves, no more palpably than the shadows of moths on the ceiling, when women are alone, unlit by the capricious and coloured light of the other sex.⁵ In the midst of this search, Woolf found meager evidence that Chloe liked Olivia, that is, that women are drawn to women. However, the scarcity of evidence is deceiving.

Women have been friends for millennia. Women have been each other’s best friends, relatives, stable companions, emotional and economic supporters, and faithful lovers. But this tradition of female friendship, like much else in women’s lives, has been distorted, dismantled, destroyed—in summary, to use Mary Daly’s term, dismembered.⁶ The dismembering of female friendship is initially the dismembering of the woman-identified Self.⁷ This lack of Self-love is grafted onto the female self under patriarchy. If the graft takes, women who do not love their Selves cannot love others like their Selves.

In spite of the primordial dismembering of female friendship and the enormous pressures put on women to exist for men, all kinds of women have been and are friends. There are women who have been and are for women. Women must learn to identify such women. Women must learn to identify their friends. This is a process not realized by anything as simple as the wearing of an identification card.

Within the last decade, we have learned something of the friendships of famous women such as Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok. Much of this knowledge has been mixed with the ambivalence or outright shock of the biographers who discovered the intensity of the female friendships of these women. For example, author Doris Faber was appalled at the emotional closeness and love revelations that were contained in Eleanor Roosevelt’s letters to Lorena Hickock.⁸ Faber’s Lesbophobia inevitably conditions what we can learn about Roosevelt and Hickok from her treatment of this friendship. However, far fewer women are aware of the traditions of female friendship recorded in the lives and writings of nuns, the religious good books or precious volumes that encouraged marriage resistance among women in the rural Kwangtung area of China, and the kind of sisterhood that prevailed among the Beguines of Europe.

A central premise of my book is that buried deep in the past, present, and future of female existence is an original and primary attraction of women for women. This attraction is neither natural nor ontological. It is manifested by many different women in many different ways. Women who have manifested and do manifest this affection for women initially care about their Selves and thus cherish the friendship of others like their Selves.

Female friendship helps create the woman of woman’s own inventiveness. Simone de Beauvoir said "if [woman] did not exist, men would have invented her. But she exists also apart from their inventiveness"⁹ The last sentence of this citation is far less quoted than the first. Only the woman who is Self-created can be an original woman, not fabricated by man, and a friend to other women. Toni Morrison takes up a similar theme of female inventiveness to describe the originality of Black women: she had nothing to fall back on; not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may well have invented herself.¹⁰

This book is a tribute to the original woman—the woman who searches for and claims her relational origins with her vital Self and with other vital women. She is not the creation of men since she does not proceed from their conceit. She is not the other of de Beauvoir’s Second Sex who is man-made. She is not the relative being who has been sired to think of herself always in intercourse with men. And she does not deny her friendship and attraction for other women. She is her Self. She is an original woman, who belongs to her Self, who is neither copied, reproduced, nor translated from man’s image of her. She is, in the now obsolete meaning of original, a rare woman.

It is one of the primary premises of this book that friendship begins with the affinity a woman has with her vital Self. A woman’s Self is her original and most enduring friend. In simple yet eloquent words, Alix Dobkin expresses this theme in her song The Woman in Your Life Is You:

Who is sure to give you courage

And who will surely make you strong

Who will bear all the joy that is coming to you, if not

The woman in your life,

She’s someone to pursue

She’s patient, and she’s waiting,

And she’ll take you home now,

The woman in your life

She can wait so easily

She knows everything you do,

Because the woman in your life is you.¹¹

Female friendship begins with the companionship of the Self. Aristotle maintained that the friend is another self. Until the Self is another friend, however, women can easily lose their Selves in the company of others.

I do not wish to romanticize the subject of female friendship. In a woman-hating society, female friendship has been tabooed to the extent that there are women who hate their original Selves and other women or who, at best, are indifferent to women. The obstacles to female friendship have taken solid root in their lives, and it is they who believe and act out the fiction that women never have been and never can be friends. This book does not pretend that all women can befriend other women.

I do believe, however, that all women have the potential to form vital friendships with women. Unfortunately, for many women this potential has been stunted before it grows to any recognizable extent. For others, it has been strangled at some definable or less definable point. In general, the obstacles to female friendship have been one of the silent spheres of feminist writing. Few feminists have wished or known how to explain the lack of women’s affection for other women.

There is a maze of obstacles to women becoming and remaining friends. We have all heard the phrase many women are worse than men or women are their own worst enemies. Probably we have also felt the force and reality of such statements in our own associations with some women. It is easier to understand the reasons why women act out anti-woman behavior than to face the reality of this behavior when it is turned against us in our own lives.

The obstacles to female friendship also arise in the lives of committed feminists who supposedly share the spirit and vision of woman-identification. Women have told me, in the course of my writing this work, that they have lost friends over feminism, that is, over personal and political differences that have been inseparably connected with their philosophies of feminist existence. Other women have expressed a sadness of unmet expectations and an inability to connect with the deepest dimensions of the women they would wish for friends. They had expected that a shared feminist vision and reality would create deeper and more caring relationships than those they had experienced in prefeminist friendships. And while they had formed alliances with women over shared political ideals, these same women had not been able to realize deep friendships with their political compeers. Some women even remarked that college friends or friends in other contexts such as the convent or even the army were more caring, respectful, and responsive on a profound existential level than many women they had befriended who shared similar radical feminist ideals.

I knew what these women were trying to describe because I had experienced this same loss in my own radical feminist lifetime: unfulfilled expectations, betrayal, lack of real caring, and the wall of insurmountable differences between friends. In a very real sense, this book has been written, in Elizabeth Gould Davis’s words, to put away [this] grief. What is more important, it is an attempt to re-member a vision of female friendship, in spite of that grief, because the reality of the ideal of friendship lives on in my Self and in other women.

Gyn/Affection and Hetero-relations

Certain words recur throughout my work, the most frequent of which are Gyn/affection, hetero-relations, and hetero-reality. Generally, Gyn/affection can be defined as woman-to-woman attraction, influence, and movement. Hetero-relations expresses the wide range of affective, social, political, and economic relations that are ordained between men and women by men. Hetero-reality describes the situation created by hetero-relations.

In many ways, Gyn/affection is a synonym for female friendship. The word Gyn/affection, however, has a context of its own which helps to elucidate how I use the term female friendship throughout this book. Dictionary definitions of affection and affect shed further light on the meaning of Gyn/affection.

The more commonly understood meaning of affection is a feeling, emotion, fondness, attachment, and love for another. In this sense, Gyn/affection connotes the passion that women feel for women, that is, the experience of profound attraction for the original vital Self and the movement toward other vital women. There is another meaning to affection, however, which conveys more than the personal movement of one woman toward another. Affection in this sense means the state of influencing, acting upon, moving, and impressing, and of being influenced, acted upon, moved, and impressed by other women. Virginia Woolf expressed this wider meaning of Gyn/affection when she said, Only women stir my imagination. She might have added, Only women stir me to action and power.

Women who affect women stimulate response and action; bring about a change in living; stir and arouse emotions, ideas, and activities that defy dichotomies between the personal and political aspects of affection. Thus Gyn/affection means personal and political movement of women toward each other. As the personal is political, so too the political is personal.

The society of ancient Greek philosophers and friends taught that politics was the business of friends. Friendship in the Greek male homo-relational tradition was the basis of the state. Aristotle, for example, taught that friendship held states together. However, the citizens of this polis were all male. Women had no civic status, and therefore friendship was an affair between men, as was also politics. Neither slaves nor women, who were considered in many ways to be slaves, could be friends or holders of political office.

In any strong sense of the word friendship, however, male citizens of the polis were not friends. If we regard this friendship of men as homo-affection, as men attracted to men, we see that such affection was at best superficially homosexual and at worst murderously affective. Male citizen-friends killed each other for power and objectified each other, especially young boys, for sexual gratification. The latter tradition has been long sustained in the gay male community’s insistent defense of boy love.

Other male political theorists have separated friendship and politics. Michael Walzer espouses this viewpoint: Friendship, like love, describes a more personal relation, and it is probably a mistake to seek the special delights of that relation in the public arena.¹² While it is true that certain kinds of political activity are and have to be possible between persons who are not friends, both politics and friendship are restored to a deeper meaning when they are brought together—that is, when political activity proceeds from a shared affection, vision, and spirit and when friendship has a more expansive political effect.

Female friendship is much more than the private face of feminist politics. Although politics and friendship cannot always go together, we need to create a feminist politics based on friendship. And we need an ideal of friendship that invests women with personal and socioeconomic power. A genuine friendship goes beyond the world of the Self’s relations with other Selves to the society in which the female Self is allowed to grow. Thus, the basic meaning of Gyn/affection is that women affect, move, stir, and arouse each other to full power. One task of feminism has been to show that the personal is political. Female friendship gives integrity to that claim.

Friendship has become such a vacuous word, so devoid of substance, that one can now speak of home cleaning products as a woman’s best friend. This is a prime example of not only depersonalizing but of depoliticizing a word—of taking its personal and political power away. This book aims to restore power and depth to the word and reality of friendship. The word Gyn/affection was created with this end in mind. The best feminist politics proceeds from a shared friendship.

This book is also concerned with returning friendship to a primary place as a basis of feminist purpose, passion, and politics. Gyn/affection is not only a loving relationship between two or more women; it is also a freely chosen bond which, when chosen, involves certain reciprocal assurances based on honor, loyalty, and affection. In this sense, one could say that friendship is a social trust. It is an understanding that is continually renewed, revitalized, and entered into not only by two or more individual women but by two or more political beings who claim social and political status for their Selves and others like their Selves.

Hetero-reality has conferred social and political status only on hetero-relations (woman-to-man relationships). In doing so, it has fostered a social context in which friendship, especially female friendship, is regarded as a personal association between individuals who reveal themselves to each other in the intimacy of their private friendly encounters. Of course, some forms of hetero-relations are also considered to be personal and intimate, such as marriage and heterosex, but neither of these is viewed as only a personal association between individuals. Both are given public status and are sustained by the laws, ceremonies, rituals, pacts, and informal consistency of hetero-reality.

I am not suggesting that women work for laws, ceremonies, or rituals to sustain Gyn/affection. Rather, I am advocating that women come to recognize in our friendships with each other the implications beyond the personal nature of this bond so that we ourselves do not underrate its social and political power, a power that, at its deepest level, is an immense force for disintegrating the structures of hetero-reality. The empowering of female friendship can create the conditions for a new feminist politics in which the personal is most passionately political.

The woman who is man-made is primed for hetero-relations. The literature, history, philosophy, and science of patriarchy have reinforced the supposedly mythic and primordial relationship of woman for man. As expressed in Genesis, and henceforth in patriarchal perpetuity, the hetero-relational imperative is one-sided. Your yearning shall be for your husband, yet he will lord it over you (Gen. 3:16–17).

It is important to understand that the norms of hetero-reality have intended woman for man and not man for woman. Women are ordained for men in quite different ways than men exist for women. The biblical dictum makes this difference quite clear. It says simply that, within hetero-reality, woman is ontologically for man; that is, she is formed by him and cannot do without him. Her man-made destiny and desire are consumed by his voracious appetite. Her essence and existence depend on her being always in relation to him. As Nancy Arnold has phrased it, woman becomes the essential non-essential.¹³

Man, however, is accidentally for woman; that is, man’s desire and his destiny, while they include women, are not encompassed by relations with women. Instead, his destiny is that of world-building in the company of his fellow men. His imperative is to create the world and its culture, science, and technology with the sweat of your brow. And man does this primarily in concert with other men.

Man’s destiny is therefore ultimately homo-relational. The normative and real power of male homo-relations is disguised by the fact that such man-to-man rapport is institutionalized in every aspect of an apparently hetero-relational culture. It is women who bear the burden of living out the hetero-relational imperative. In truth, this is a male homo-relational society built on male-male relations, transactions, and bonding at all levels. Hetero-relations serve to provide men with sustenance and support from women that they do not get from men. Hetero-reality is the foil for homo-reality.

Clearly, what we observe here is no outright promotion of male homosexuality, although in certain arenas homo-relations and homosexuality coexist quite nicely. Most of the time, as Andrea Dworkin has noted, "male homosexuality in male-supremacist societies has always been contained and controlled by men as a class, though the strategies of containment have differed, to protect men from rape by other men, to order male sexuality so that it is,