The Company She Keeps

by Valerie Hey

This lively and revealing study explores a sociologically invisible but important social girls' friendships. It uncovers often suppressed school-girl cultures, at times representing in their most condensed and dramatic form issues of intimacy, secrecy and struggle. Most women have memories of, and most mothers of young daughters become re-immersed in, these all-consuming but little understood passions. This taken-for-granted 'ordinary' relationship is examined using girls' notes, talk, diaries and interviews gathered by observing girls groups within city schools. An important and previously ignored question is addressed by examining how girls' intimacy is structured through class, gender, sexuality and race, especially its paradoxical role in maintaining and challenging 'compulsory heterosexuality'. In this way, a series of case studies analyses how girls variously come to understand and construct "difference". In addition, this detailed analysis of girls' friendship contributes to our understanding of how girls simultaneously survive their schools, their families, their relations and subordination to boys and men. Valerie Hey returns the reader to the terrain of loss and recollection, of girls' pleasure and pain in their friendship, and asserts the claims of the social through identifying how this is written into the cultural forms of girls' relationships with each other. Students of women's studies, education, sociology and social psychology will find this book to be an invaluable exploration of how every-day 'obvious' experience is played out as forms of subjectivity and power.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Natalia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disclaimer; I have not finished the book in its entirety. I may edit the review if/when I finish it.

The author chose a very interesting - and as she rightfully observed - under-studied topic, which is: the nature of close female friendships, especially during school years.

The structure is clear and academic, but the writing struggles to be engaging. A lot is lost in jargon and commentary which doesn't seem to make many strong nor concrete points/conclusions thus far.

The most engaging parts tend to be the direct quotes from school girls, their interactions, and teachers.

Nevertheless, some interesting points are made - such as comments about the 'moral' aspect of female friendships, and how women have very different expectations of their friends to men: they see friends through a lens of duties one owes their friend and friendship. Also interesting was the point of how female friendships seem to be more of an intimate/secretive/exclusionary business than male friendships. It is a shame that the author does not go further into these ideas, but swiftly moves on to other ideas, such as aestheticisation and objectification of women within subcultures (e.g. hippie/punk/perhaps if written today, there would be an honourable mention of Goth Girlfriends.)