A Passion for Friends

Janice Raymond

• Publisher: Spinifex Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781742194493
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This feminist classic explores the many manifestations of friendship between women and examines the ways women have created their own communities and destinies through friendship.

Notes

Introduction

1. The phrase is Kate Clinton’s. Her first album, entitled Making Light, can be obtained from Making Light Productions, P.O. Box 93, Cazenovia, NY 13035. Clinton defies the boundaries of hetero-relational humor and reclaims a true women’s wit. She is not only a practitioner of humor but a theorist as well. See Kate Clinton, “Making Light: Another Dimension, Some Notes on Feminist Humor,” Trivia: A Journal of Ideas 1 (Fall 1982): 37–42.

2. Lily Tomlin, On Stage, Arista Records (1977).

3. Olga Carlisle, “In Praise of Old Nantucket,” New York Times Magazine, 8 August 1982, p. 28.

4. Douglas Johnson, “Managing the Great Man’s Memory,” review of Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, by Simone de Beauvoir, in New York Times Book Review, 6 May 1984, p. 11.

5. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, 1929), p. 88.

6. Daly uses this term in Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1978) to indicate the way in which women have been deprived of our history and traditions and encouraged to forget by “patriarchal erasure of our tradition.” As the female body has been dismembered, so too has women’s memory of our heritage.

7. Again I use Mary Daly’s device of capitalizing Self to distinguish between the man-made feminine self—“the imposed/internalized false ‘self’” of women—and the authentic Self which women are re-creating.

8. Doris Faber, The Life of Lorena Hickok, E.R.’s Friend (New York: Morrow, 1980), esp. pp. 330–32.

9. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley (New York: Bantam, 1952), p. 174.

10. Toni Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” New York Times Magazine, 22 August 1971, p. 63.

11. Alix Dobkin with Kay Gardner, “The Woman in Your Life Is You,” recorded on Lavender Jane Loves Women (1975), Ladyslipper Music, Box 3124, Durham, NC 27705. Dobkin, one of the first feminist and lesbian singers to write and perform women’s music, is one of the remnant of feminist musicians who still creates strong Gyn/affective lyrics with both a personal and political message.

12. Michael Walzer, Radical Principles (New York: Basic, 1980), p. 13.

13. Nancy Arnold, “Toward a Personal Feminist Theory” (paper in feminist theory, University of Massachusetts, 1983), p. 3.

14. Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Perigee, 1981), p. 61.

15. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p. 63.

16. Mary Catherine Bateson, With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (New York: Morrow, 1984), p. 34.

17. I have often asked students in my Women and Health Issues courses how many of them would want their mothers present if they chose to give birth. Very few students answer in the affirmative.

18. De Beauvoir, Second Sex, p. 65.

19. De Beauvoir, Second Sex, p. xvi, quoting Benda, Rapport d’Uriel.

20. Alice Walker uses this word in a variety of ways. In its primary meaning, she applies it to black women, “usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior… In charge. Serious.” In its secondary sense, Walker defines “womanist” as “a woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility…and women’s strength.” In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt, 1983), pp. xi-xii.

21. I use the capital letter L to indicate, as Mary Daly has pointed out, the difference between woman-identified Lesbians and those lesbians (indicated by a small l) who, although they...

Table of contents

• Other books by Janice Raymond:
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• I Origins of Female Friendship: In the Beginning Was Woman
• II Varieties of Female Friendship: The Nun As Loose Woman
• III More Loose Women: The Chinese Marriage Resisters
• IV Obstacles to Female Friendship
• V A Vision of Female Friendship: Two Sights-seeing
• Notes
• Index