Bad Friend summary

“I have caught the contagion: I have fallen in love,” confessed Mount Holyoke freshman Matilda Calder in 1893. Her beloved wasn’t a dashing young man, but her female professor. Half the girls on campus shared her infatuation. Scandalous? Far from it. These girl-on-girl infatuations, known variously as “crushes,” “raves,” “pashes,” or “mashes,” were a celebrated feature of Victorian women’s education.

At elite English boarding schools like Wycombe Abbey in the early 1900s, devotion took tangible form: girls filled their beloved’s hot water bottles, turned down their beds, prepared dried flower gifts, and saved tea biscuits to press into their hands. American colleges developed their own passionate culture. Older female students “dated” younger ones, guiding them through campus social life. Smith sophomore Fanny Garrison described an 1898 dance where a student dressed as a “stunning man” caused “much flirtation.” Campus newspapers even published anonymous love poems between female students.

Steam billows from manholes, and horse-drawn carriages clatter down cobblestone streets. In the hectic streets of turn-of-the-century New York, among department store windows and factory whistles, a new figure emerges: the single young woman, alone but determined.

Never before had so many young women been “suddenly released from the protection of the home,” as the sociologist Jane Addams observed in 1913. They arrived from small towns and distant countries, transforming into factory workers, shopgirls, and stenographers. In this intimidating metropolis, female friendship provided more than companionship; it ensured survival.

“Shoulder to shoulder and friend to friend!” This was the rallying cry of the English suffragettes, who placed friendship at the heart of their revolutionary work. For these feminists, friendship was the force that transformed individual grievances into collective action. When suffragette Frances Power Cobbe reflected on her connections to “nearly all the more gifted Englishwomen” of her time, she wasn’t boasting. She was acknowledging how these relationships energized social reform.

One example: when Lola Maverick Lloyd, a wealthy Texan suffragist and divorced mother of four, first heard Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian peace activist and lecturer, speak in 1914, their instant connection sparked a lifelong alliance. Lloyd provided financial backing and housing for the impoverished and stateless activist – creating the foundation that allowed Schwimmer’s pioneering international peace work to flourish.

Melanie Griffiths in shoulder pads in Working Girl. Diane Keaton climbing the corporate ladder in Baby Boom. Holly Hunter choosing between career and romance in Broadcast News. You’d be forgiven for thinking the Hollywood trope of the working girl came into being in the 1980s.

You’d be wrong.

Picture a medieval village square: women gathering at the well, or spinning together, sharing news over communal tasks. This wasn’t just socializing – it was a rich tradition of female connection that sustained communities for centuries. These women attended births together, nursed each other’s sick, and mourned their dead. In short, they practiced the art of neighboring, building relationships through what sociologists now call “invisible leisure” – meaningful connection woven seamlessly into the fabric of daily life.

Household account books reveal these bonds were cemented through practical exchanges – borrowing kitchen implements, sharing salves, and making gifts of homemade sweets. While these may not have all been bonds of the BFF variety, these connections served a vital purpose: sustaining community.