A Love Letter on Female Friendships through Four Generations
Written by Sophie Marx
Photography by Yvonne Marx
Growing up as girls, for most of us, female friendships dominated our transformative years. Yet, there will often come a point when societal influences dampen our faith in the pureness of some friendships, torn apart by competitive conceptions. At the same time, we also know that there are many days in our lives where the only relationship that can comfort our pain, build us back up again, or make us feel seen is that with our female friends.
A few years ago, as I was talking to my grandmother in our kitchen, she remarked that she admired the friendships with women my mum had kept and nourished over decades. She said it was different when she was younger.
Her comment made me curious. What was it about the time my grandmother or my great-grandmother were raised in that dismissed the importance of female friendships? And what is it about female friendships that is so crucial to our well-being and sense of self?
While we are aware of the feelings female friendships cause within us, breaking it down to specific words and causes suddenly becomes a lot more difficult. Does the source of female understanding originate in our brain chemistry, our processing of information and emotions in a more similar way? Or is it the ominous female experience that grants us a natural understanding of each other based on shared experiences in our male-dominated society?
I wanted to start at my beginning and trace through four generations of my family to chronicle how our ideas of female friendships grew, shaped past and present lives, and influenced the women we became.
My great-grandmother Lieschen was born in 1933 in a small town in East Germany, the same year Hitler came to power. It was not only a man’s world she grew up in but one where, if you weren’t tough or if you stepped out of line, it could cost you your life. When she was eighteen, she became pregnant for the first time. Contrary to the norm of the time, however, her father did not yet want her to get married to her boyfriend, telling her, “You don’t need to get married yet; you’re too young.” Only after the second child, who was to become my grandmother fifty years later, did they get married. She was nineteen and the main breadwinner of her new family. My great-grandmother never had noteworthy female friendships throughout her young life. She was popular, but friendships were not what society deemed important. To make it in the world, she carried the belief that you ought to be anything other than feminine.
Despite the fact that the war was at last over and peace was flourishing in the West, in the East, things were once again about to take a turn for the worse. My great-grandfather had spent six months incarcerated under the new regime. Their third child was born in 1960, where my great-grandmother was sharing a room with the wife of a police officer. The police officer pulled my great-grandfather aside, knowing his past troubles with the regime, and told him that if he and his family didn’t get out of the East now, they never would.
Looking at Lieschen’s tumultuous life, I have asked myself if friendships in her life up until that point were less relevant because of the war and the regime that followed, whether it was because of the time or just because my great-grandmother had different priorities in mind. And more pressingly, how does it shape a woman’s life if we don’t have female friendships?
With regards to my great-grandmother’s life, I sometimes wonder if female friendships could have helped her elevate her life in those areas where our heart, if we listen to it, speaks louder than our mind. Could they have saved her from an abusive marriage? Would they have made it easier to connect with her daughter?
It was only in the last couple of years that my great-grandmother has become closer to my grandmother, my mum, and myself. With time, she started opening up to us for the first time in her life about who she is and embracing her feminine side, if with hesitancy. I don’t want to imply that her “masculine” traits are not her, but I would make the argument that they did not become a part of her from a place of peace. Instead, they appear as more of an armour, a way for a strong-minded, fierce woman in the mid-20th century to live her life more freely and to claim her place in a male-dominated world. To Lieschen, femininity is still closely connected to weakness. She was raised by the second wave of feminism and under the veil of war, dictatorship, and repression of the individual. I think she felt as if she had no choice but to become, in her life as well as in her marriage, a second-rank man and husband.
Growing up in an environment where friendships, particularly female friendships, as well as embracing femininity didn’t serve women to be regarded as equals, this understanding of womanhood translated over to Lieschen’s daughter Moni in the ’50s and ’60s.
Being refugees in their own country, constantly moving around, and growing up under a harsh roof where neither love, friendship, nor happiness carried true weight, my grandmother admitted that she struggled forming meaningful female friendships until she almost reached her teenage years. It was the zeitgeist to prioritise marriage over one’s own pursuits (if you were a woman especially), and when she met my grandfather, Moni got married at twenty and gave birth to her first child, my mother, in 1972.
My grandmother had friends at school and girls she liked and would occasionally hang out with. I am not sure whether it was because of the male-dominated worldview her family had imposed on her or society that continued to prioritise finding a husband and starting a family over female friendships, but most of her friendships in life became not just hers but couple friends. Often, they were relatives too. While my grandparents would continue to nourish their friendships, having four kids by the age of 29, family life and the need to provide automatically overshadowed the possibility of making strong new friendships and watching other friendships flourish.
I feel as if I keep insinuating that it’s harder to make strong female friendships when one gets married young, especially when one starts building a family shortly after, and while that might not be a universal truth, for Lieschen and Moni, that was the case. When I put their examples in contrast to my mum, a child of the wild ’70s, heavily influenced by the girl power of the ’80s (which was also the time getting married young in Germany slowly became less normalised), dating became more than just about marriage, and female friendships, individuality, as well as knowing that she could have her own place as a woman in this world, shaped her views. My mum, Ila, knew she would not need a man to be someone. While it was still easier being a man when you wanted to be someone, icons such as Nena or Madonna paved the way to show girls that being a woman was more than good enough. It was something to be proud of and enjoyed to the fullest.
Originally, my mum’s first best friend was her neighbour and distant cousin, a boy. They were inseparable throughout their childhood, but his father eyed the friendship with displeasure as they grew older, and they stayed each other’s favourite person. Fearing his son would not become masculine and would spend most of his free time with a girl as his best friend, he forbade him to continue their friendship as they reached double digits. They stayed friends, though slightly estranged, and focused on same-sex friendships throughout their teenage years.
Can female friendships then be seen as something we are almost pressured into under the guise that girl-boy friendships always have the shadow of sexuality and gender attached to them? Maybe to a degree. But then again, especially once we hit puberty, our bodies do change, and inevitably our different genders and our sexuality take on a more prominent role in our lives. Therefore, it can be comforting to have other women in our corner to share the female experience with—from leaving girlhood to entering womanhood. Yet, as we know, female friendships are about so much more than that.
I found it hard to put into words what makes these friendships as special as they are, but I will try. When I look at the female friendships in my mum’s life, most of which she has cultivated over decades, I realise that they have probably played the most important part in preserving the parts of who she is outside of her marriage and motherhood in the most beautiful way I can imagine. Especially once her nest emptied with me leaving, giving her once again more time to spend with her friends, I have noticed her going back to the roots of her youth. She never reduced herself to any one thing: to being a daughter, wife, mother, or professional, and I believe the strength her female friendships hold has played a big part in that.
No matter how overwhelming life can get, knowing you can spend time with your platonic soulmates and be transported back to times when you were in your early twenties making light of the heavy—the severity of having your emotions understood by someone who continues to love you and put effort into a relationship even though they don’t “have” to—it feels a little like coming home to your own room.
In my own life, I have learned more about what it means to be in a loving relationship from my female friends than from any romantic relationship. But not only that. Once I realised the importance of prioritising female friendships over dating, I noticed myself embracing who I am more than I had ever dared to do before. With my girls, I don’t have to pretend to be tough when I don’t feel like it. If my mind is going down in spirals, they understand and go down the rabbit hole with me. When I take a risk, they are right there with me, and if one of us succeeds in something we dreamt of accomplishing, we are right there to cheer each other on.
Women continue to be compared to each other, and jealousies and rivalries are attempted to be fostered from within our community and without. At least in my experience, once we embrace the beauty of female friendships and are wrapped in their healing embrace, this burden seems to lift a little. Even within the four generations of my family, I have seen how being close to each other has helped all of us to embrace the complexity of female characters. We choose what it means to us to be a woman, and there is no better support in achieving that quest than in the friendships with other women.
