Editorial

The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter March/April, 2000 Volume 7, Number 2 Friendships Among Successful Women Based upon an article entitled, "Whatever Happened to Friendship" which appeared in the March 3, 2000 issue of The Wall Street Journal. by Rita J. Simon

A n article entitled, "Whatever Happened to Friendship" appeared in the March 3, 2000 issue of The Wall Street Journal. The thrust of the article was that most people are too busy to maintain friendships. Spending time with friends is a guilt trip. What time is left after work is usually devoted to spouses and children. A recent survey conducted by Sociologist Rebecca Adams, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, reports that young adulthood and old age are the periods of life when people have the most friends, and middle age is the time of life when people have the least friends. The number of "best friends" the average adult has is 1 - 2, and the number of close friends the average person has is 4 - 6.

A few years ago a colleague of mine (Gloria Danzinger) and I conducted a study that asked: "How important, are close friendships to successful, career-oriented, women, and how much- time are they willing to devote to cultivating and maintaining those friendships?" To find the answers, we conducted long (2 to 3 hours) personal interviews with 27 women in New York, Washington, Chicago, and London. The picture that emerged about the place and importance of close friends among these women should not be generalized to friendships among women as a whole. By the amount of money they earn, and by the types of positions they occupy, the women we interviewed are different from the large majority of their gender. Their answers however tell us a lot about the importance of friendships today among "busy people."

Many of them expressed thoughts similar to the following: This notion of sisterhood and deep bonds among women was something that might have been true in the late sixties and seventies. But today friendships among women are more and more on work-related issues and are primarily to provide emotional support for career ambitions. Time constraints, job demands, and family pressures all take precedence, severely curtailing the time allotted to make contact with friends.

The majority of women interviewed told us that friendship is important to them, but that regular contacts with friends lose out in the daily struggle to find the time and place for competing demands. Sixteen of the twenty-seven women felt that friends were important; eleven felt that they were not. Ten of those who felt that friends were important were married; of those to whom friends were not important, six were married.

There were two ways in which women who considered friendship important accommodated their needs. The first was to plan well in advance times when they would be free to meet their friends. But that, too, led to frustration. The women interviewed would generally talk to their friends once a month, and see them even less frequently. In many cases, these women have close friends who live in different areas of the country, and contact dropped to phone calls once every few months. A law professor describes her relationship with two close friends who live in distant cities this way: "I speak to them a few times a year and I see them if I happen to be passing by their respective towns on business. My friends are people who are willing to accept me as not pursuing friendships."

The second and more common method of dealing with a desire for friends was to create friendships at the job. For example, a woman who runs her own political consulting firm explained that "there is always a reason for meeting friends, a framework surrounds it, such as business reasons." Another Washington, D.C., professional woman, a bank president, saw her friends more often than most of those interviewed, because they all tended to show up at the same receptions. And when this bank president sponsored parties for prospective clients of the bank, she always invited her friends, whose charm and social graces, she says, "liven things up and make everyone feel comfortable."

Although women find it easier than men to create friendships on the job, there is little loyalty among them as women per se. The networking so prevalent in the seventies was absent among the women we spoke to. What help is given to other women is usually provided through informal contacts.

The reason for the lack of formal networks: no time. Often they regard "success in a man's world" as their contribution toward helping women. It seems that the purpose of networking in the seventies - to provide support for success and ambition is fulfilled today by one's own individual network of friends. And that, too, is the importance of friendship for most of the women we spoke to. Rather than the constant, daily nurturing provided by frequent and intense contact, friends are important just because they are there, because they can be contacted if necessary, and because they provide a sense of identity for women following similar paths.

Just as there is little formal networking among women, it is rarely the case that women look toward other women as mentors. Most of the women interviewed had male mentors.

A further by-product of women's increased participation in the professional work force is the growth of close friendships with men. Several of the women interviewed actively sought out male friendships "for business purposes." One of our respondents explained that "they give you a male perspective that you need, particularly in business. They give me good advice and solutions that I just wouldn't have recognized and neither would my female friends." Inevitably, this closeness leads to sexual tension which must be resolved in order for the relationship to continue, and which is resolved, according to most women.

Many of the women we interviewed saw their husbands as their closest friend, and the only person toward whom they allowed themselves to feel dependent. We saw a certain irony in the relationship that these successful women had vis-a-vis their husbands compared to women who played more traditional roles. Traditional women are more dependent on their husbands for financial support and economic security than are career women. But the traditional women are not as dependent on their husbands for emotional support, comfort, friendship, and love as are successful professional women. The former turn to their sisters, their mothers, their friends, for those kinds of support. The professional career woman is more likely to cut herself off from those ties.

Toward the end of the interview, one woman said, "I am not willing, or able, to put time into friendships; I want to spend most of it on work and some on family. I'll probably be sorry twenty years from now." That attitude characterizes the one train of thought running consistently through all our conversations with these high powered, high achieving women: the fulfillment and delight of career success takes a heavy toll, perhaps the heaviest, when it comes to friendship. The full price to be paid remains to be seen.