By Tabitha Bozeman
My grandmother used to quote Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State, saying, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” It felt empowering, but also a little uncomfortable. It has taken many years for me to come close to articulating why, and I think it comes down to believing who someone is when they show you. All of us have experienced being offered a seat at the proverbial table, only to have it yanked away. Man or woman, that experience is no fun. For many women, though, it is one of many contradictory experiences we will encounter in our interactions with other women. On one hand, society often sets women up as competitors and challengers: for friendships, jobs, partners, the perfect style, and so on. But, on the other hand, we are also told that we should be supporting one another no matter what because being a woman is hard. How do we reconcile these two ideals? Even as a young girl, I felt that sharp division of that quote. The assumption that there are “good women” and “bad women.” Women who help, and women who don’t. In my life, I have been helped by women who have changed my life for the good, but I have also been hurt by women in ways that were devastating.
I have probably been both of these women to someone at one time or another.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie observed that “We teach girls to see each other as competitors.” We are also told to support one another, but often we are not given the tools we need to do so. What we are taught–through the women around us as we are growing up, the shows we watch on television, the lyrics to our favorite songs–is how to compare and measure ourselves against other women. We are taught, implicitly and explicitly, how to compete, but then told to perform solidarity.
These tensions between competition and connection in female friendships appear throughout literature, offering both encouragement and warning for the rest of us: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West had a deep and sustaining friendship and collaboration; Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil formed an intellectual sisterhood and were fierce advocates for one another; Mary Wollstonecraft and Fanny Blood are one of the first recorded intellectual female friendships; Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton survived many parallel life situations and relationships; Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara intentionally supported made one another visible; Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde were both friends, collaborators, and critics of one another. Literary history shows us these women and their friendships in all their complicated, devoted, passionate, wounded, comforting, and intentional moments. These women found connection because of and despite circumstances, education, men, families, careers, politics, and distance. The goal in these friendships was never perfection, but connection. Being seen and heard. Being validated and celebrated. Being challenged and cherished. Connection is all of these things, and all the while it is messy, human, and deeply consequential.
Being truly seen and allowed to share your world, and thoughts, and life is one of the most beautiful parts of friendship between women because as Virginia Woolf wrote, “Nothing has really happened until it has been described.” As we move through our lives, friendships that have stood the test of time are sources of comfort and solace because as Zora Neale Hurston put it “there are years that ask questions, and years that answer.” A solid friendship can help us navigate those questions and answers and years. A solid friendship is also one that is willing to both say and hear Truth. This can be difficult if, as women, we only focus on the first part of the challenger/supporter dichotomy. The ability for us as women to hold both of those contradictions in mind, to remember that more than one thing can be true at a time, is necessary for crafting and maintaining strong, healthy friendships. Adrienne Rich told us that when she said, “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”
This is what I have realized about my grandmother’s quote. Strength is not about sorting women into categories of “good” and “bad,” deciding who belongs where, or gatekeeping the seats at the table. It is about responsibility, and awareness, and choice because not every woman will support us. Not every friendship will last–not every relationship is meant to. But we each have the ability to decide, over and over again, what kind of woman we will be. We can choose to support one another through both speaking up and listening. Through paying attention and also through letting things go. Through both telling and accepting the truth. We can choose to make space for others, and we can choose connection over competition. Each day, women have the opportunity to make life a little better for one another, and a little more connected for us all. After all, as George Eliot asks us, “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”
