Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship

by Kayleen Schaefer

We accept this state of constant fear as just another part of being a girl. We text each other when we get home

Women were too deceitful to relate to one another in the pure, selfless way men did.

In its earliest uses, a catfight meant an actual physical altercation between women. One of the first citings of the term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in 1854 by writer Benjamin G. Ferris to describe scuffles between Mormon wives in his book Utah and the Mormons: The History, Government, Doctrines, Customs, and Prospects of the Latter-day Saints.

Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media.

Afterward, CC asks her husband, “What will I do without a best friend?” “You have me,” he says. “It’s not the same,” she says.

Rush is not chill. There’s a schedule (two days of open houses, followed by Philanthropy Day, then Skit Night, and finally Pref Night)

what????

The “crush parties” were my favorite. That’s when you invited two guys—anonymously—to a bar by sending them a sorority T-shirt.

It was called “candlelight.” At the Monday night meeting, the president would hold up a candle that had been left on her bed by a mystery sorority member and shout, “Candlelight tonight!” After the meeting, we’d all stand in a circle singing a song in which part of the lyrics was about “pining for you”

This behavior, I think, comes from the same place my refusing to befriend other women at the office did: the fear that only one woman can be promoted.

“Chosen families” comes from the queer community in the 1980s, as used in anthropologist Kath Weston’s Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. It refers to how gays and lesbians formed their own support systems either because they’d been turned away from their birth families (or turned away themselves) or because they were not legally allowed to marry or adopt children.

the Barbizon Hotel for Women, once housed Grace Kelly, Joan Crawford, Ali MacGraw, Liza Minnelli, and Sylvia Plath. Plath used it in her 1963 novel The Bell Jar, disguising it as the Amazon, a building she wrote that was for well-to-do girls whose parents “wanted to make sure their daughters were living in a place where men couldn’t get at them and deceive them,” she wrote. Sarah lived in her sorority house during