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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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Bad Friend summary
Tiffany Watt Smith
How Women Revolutionized Modern Friendship
21 mins
Brief summary
Bad Friend by Tiffany Watt Smith delves into the complexities of friendship, examining what makes someone a bad friend, the impact of such relationships, and how these dynamics reflect on our personal and social lives.
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Bad Friend
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Women have always had friendships … contrary to male opinion
French essayist Michel de Montaigne captured the sensibilities of his time when he wrote, in his 1580 essay “On Friendship” that women were incapable of this “holy bond of friendship, nor do their souls seem firm enough to withstand the clasp of a knot so lasting and so tightly drawn.” This rhetoric wasn’t new. In fact, Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, explicitly excluded women from his highest category of friendship, claiming that, unlike men, they lacked the capacity for intimate platonic friendships.
Women weren’t cut out for friendship. That was the theory, anyway. But theory and practice don’t always line up, do they?
While writers and philosophers debated whether women could be friends at all, real women were busy actually being friends in ways far richer than any male critic gave them credit for.
Phillis Wheatley and Obour Tanner forged their friendship in 1770s New England and maintained it over a lifetime of correspondence. Both had been kidnapped from West Africa and enslaved in America. In a society that denied their basic humanity, each found in the other an intellectual and spiritual soul mate. When Wheatley became the first published African American poet, it was Tanner she trusted to gather subscribers for her groundbreaking book. Their letters are a trove of shared theological debates, discussions about abolition, confidences, complaints, offers of practical help, and emotional support.
Similarly, the writer Mary Wollstonecraft enjoyed such a close friendship with Fanny Blood that when Blood died, Wollstonecraft wore a mourning ring featuring a lock of Blood’s hair for the rest of her life. Meeting in 1775 when Wollstonecraft was sixteen, she described Blood as “[she] whom I love better than all the world…. To live with this friend is the height of my ambition.” Their bond became “the ruling passion” of Wollstonecraft’s mind. The two lived together independently and even cofounded a school – remarkable feats for women at the time.
Women have always been capable of friendship, despite men’s low estimations of them. Funnily enough, within a few hundred years of Montaigne’s damning essay, men would be starting to worry that women were actually too good at friendship.
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What is Bad Friend about?
Bad Friend (2025) explores the fascinating and understudied subject of female friendship throughout history. This survey of friendships between women introduces the reader to Victorian schoolgirl attachments, Depression-era workplace confidantes, feminist consciousness-raising circles, and more. It also offers an incisive analysis of the way mainstream culture has alternately ignored, policed, and celebrated this specific bond.
Who should read Bad Friend?
- History lovers who want to uncover untold stories of female friendship
- Feminists ready to learn how female friendship has shaped resistance and revolution
- Anyone who is, or has, a female friend
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