American Women Writers: An Overview
Platonic Relationships and Patriarchy
From the timeline, we can observe the absence of platonic relationships between men and women from the Colonial period to the Post-Modern period. Every single man our main female characters meet and form relationships with are romantic or familial. In the beginning of woman's writing, there were restrictions on what they could publish and they relied in some part on appealing to patriarchal standards for representations of women. This could have influenced the prevalence of the conventional "American Sentimental Tradition" within the narratives, often including a young heroine facing a moral dilemma among a temptation plot which ends in marriage (McDade). The construction of what is means to be "American" post-puritanism was also a factor, where is was the popular sentiment that women have power, "in matters pertaining to the education of their children, in the selection and support of a clergyman, in all benevolent enterprises, and in all questions relating to morals or manners," but not in political matters, financial or economic matters, within their marriage, over their own education, or socially free to express opinions or discourse (Beecher). Even as we move into the post-modern era, there is still a lack of male-female friendships represented by women writers and an emphasis on romance; because for the most part these platonic relationships don't exist due to patriarchal culture and the historical categorization of girls as future wives. As a result, relationships between women have a larger impact on the narratives, even when they aren't fully formed friendships, because the motivations underlying these relationships are not romantic: Hope and Magawisca, Malaeska and Sarah, Iola and Marie, Genevieve and Wynema, Lorelei and Dorothy.
The idea that friendships between women are more genuine is a common contemporary sentiment in the age of modern feminism, which likes to point out how the patriarchy hurts men too through the absence of emotional connections with other men. While this is the truth, it is also a reflection of having to make something “attractive” for men or the patriarchy to care about it. It’s not that feminism doesn’t benefit men too, it’s that to try and make them care, we must only focus on how it benefits them. Feminist men on TikTok will often appeal to other men by using these talking points as well; that they can’t have deep friendships with their male friends because they believe they can only be emotional with women they intend to be romantic with. Men seek out relationships with women because they are missing out on an emotional outlet in their everyday lives, while women have that in their girl-friends from a young age. This causes them to seek out women they see as potential partners instead of potential friends, because men just aren’t emotional with friends, regardless of gender, at all. Of course, these are big generalizations, yet as a group and as we see throughout the timeline, men don’t seek out “friendships” with women they aren’t attracted to and/or see as a future wife. In fact, they don't tend to seek out relationships with them at all in that case. Not every woman has the same experience, but in the course of my life, I have never had a friendship with a man that didn't turn out to have romantic feelings towards me. We also notice how the female characters' romantic dilemmas revolve around the loss of agency that happens once committed to marriage; they want to stay true to themselves, but they know they must become a wife and a mother once married. That isn't even mentioning the fact that it was the only form of economic currency for women until only about half a century ago when women were nationally allowed to have their own bank account and credit card. The focus on the loss of self that happens through marriage, and the fear of it, shows how women know they must change for a relationship with a man in a way they don't have to when forming relationships with women.
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