FRIENDS SAVE YOU EVERY TIME

I wouldn’t be here without my friends.
How often have you said, or thought, that in the last year?
As important as friendships are to us now, in the 19th century and earlier, they were sometimes the single most important factor in whether a woman had a manageable life, or unending misery.
From the colonial period, women cultivated relationships with their neighbors, extended family, or church connections, not just to have somebody to talk to, but to share work and resources. In the days before washing machines, vacuum cleaners (and helpful husbands), it took a staggering amount of physical labor simply to maintain a clean, decent home.
Often women had servants to help, but just as often, they had the daughter of a friend who was learning to run her own household one day. For really big tasks, neighbors and friends might work together. Monday became infamous as laundry day for several reasons, but one was simple: if everyone is working on the same task, they can help each other.
Women didn’t just share work – they shared food and other resources too. Ethel “borrowing” a cup of sugar from Lucy is just the echo of something that had been happening from the first time two Pilgrim families built cabins close by.
That same network of friendships enabled women to survive in the tenements; they would help watch each other’s children, share what little they had with a friend in need, and rally around a neighbor when some disaster struck. A woman with a strong network of friends, and often family, had a much safer and happier life than someone who had no one.
So, women prized their friends.
Ella Shane is no different. She’s well aware that the only reason her mother survived as long as she did in the tenements was the network of friends and neighbors…so she has a strong incentive to make and keep good women friends.
But it’s much more than that.
Ella has deep bonds with her closest friends because they’re going through many of the same experiences as women testing the limits of their time. Her singing partner, Marie de l’Artois, has found a way to combine a career and a family, something that was almost impossible then. But Marie has what she needs to make it happen: an extraordinary talent, an understanding husband…and accepting employers, like Ella’s opera company.
As close as Ella and Marie are, she probably has more in common with her other close friend – Hetty MacNaughten. As one of two female reporters on her newspaper, The Beacon, Hetty is facing an even tougher professional challenge than Ella and Marie. Everyone at least acknowledges that women are needed to sing their roles. Nobody acknowledges the need for a woman reporter.
More, unlike Marie, who is somewhat insulated by her private life as Mrs. Paul Winslow, Hetty is right out on the front lines of the New Woman’s world. So is Ella. When Ella and Hetty take off for velocipede rides or walks in the park, they often talk about their work and the challenge of being a woman doing a “man’s job.”
Just as the tenement women help each other any way they can, so do Ella, Hetty and Marie. Because whether you’re a colonial goodwife, New Woman…or 21st century girlboss, you aren’t going to get very far without your friends.

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