Best Friends provides the missing link to understanding and recognizing the impact of some of the most important relationships in girls' and women's lives.
Every woman remembers the sting of betrayal of a girlfriend, and every parent of a daughter has seen her come home from school in tears because a girl she thought was her best friend suddenly and inexplicably became her enemy. While boys hash out differences with fists and kicks, girls' societies are marked by secrets and whispers and shifting affection. The lessons learned as an adolescent girl are often carried into adulthood, making women fear confrontation - especially with other women. But the intensity of the struggles reflects the support and healing to be found within these friendships. Girls find themselves in the mirror of other girls, hence the power each has to influence the other.
Ruthellen Josselson and Terri Apter's many years of working with hundreds of girls and women have given them insight into the emotionally important relationships that are integral to a girl's self-image. Best Friends explores the bonds of friendship between girls and between women and the sorrows and joys they experience together, from early adolescence and throughout their lives.
Having spent years studying girls and women, we became aware of a disturbing lack of attention to girls' friendships. We have followed the growing scholarly and public interest in how girls develop and why adolescent girls are experiencing so much depression and anorexia and so many other disorders. We have puzzled over the fact that so many psychologists have located the storm centers of girls' experiences in families that don't understand them; in patriarchal society, which objectifies them; in schools that ignore them; and in the media, which encourages them to hold to impossible standards of beauty and behavior. Bur girls' emotional lives are lived with their girlfriends, and it is through their friendships that much of developmental significance comes to them. Why, we asked each other, isn't anyone writing about this?
Mothers of adolescent girls are particularly chagrined when they see their daughters, whose lives they could pretty well manage before early adolescence, in great distress because of events with their girlfriends - events mothers can neither see clearly nor control. Dealing with the cries of a hungry infant seems, in retrospect, like easy work compared to finding a way to respond to a daughter who was not invited to a party or whose best friend suddenly drops her. How can a mother counsel a daughter whose heart is set on that most elusive of prizes - popularity? Often, mothers attempt to minimize these problems, thinking, "Oh, well, she'll get over it." Girls then conclude, "'She doesn't understand," and become unable to talk to their mothers. But mothers do understand, all too well. They understand from their own adolescence, even though these are painful experiences they would just as soon not remember.
Moreover, as women work together in companies, schools, and hospitals, these old dilemmas appear in new guises. Many women we interviewed described their workplaces as having much in common with junior high, as subgroups and shifting alliances with female coworkers, where issues of loyalty and betrayal, become the emotional center of the workday. Even as grown-up women, we don't "get over" the dilemmas of friendship; we carry our adolescent selves around with us.
We began this project working as like-minded colleagues; we met through our work. Our plan to write the book first emerged early in 1993 when Terri, at Ruthellen's invitation, gave a paper to the Harvard Colloquium on Human Development, presenting her research on girls' cliques in primary school. A brief conversation gave us the sense of homecoming: A book about girls' and women's friendships was an idea that would stick. Modern technology allowed us to work together with an ocean between us. Both of us wrote from the information and insights gleaned from years of interviews with girls and women, and we conducted yet more interviews specifically for this project. Terri observed girls on the playground of a British state (i.e., public) school while Ruthellen wrote from her experience as a therapist to adolescent girls and women.
We also talked to guidance counselors and principals, who fervently told us that it was about time someone talked about this. Middle-school counselors, in particular, told us that the majority of their time is spent trying to console or advise girls in the throes of friendship problems. We were invited to come and listen to worried parents (primarily mothers) anxious and uncertain about how to handle their adolescent daughters' anguish at the hands of friends. We also drew from our own experiences, and the deeply personal nature of our writing convinced us that we should adhere to, when appropriate, the first-person singular of the narratives. The "I" in many vignettes refers sometimes to Ruthellen, sometimes to Terri. But the entire book was written together, layered by each author, each contributing to the authorial voice.
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