A Passion for Friends

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JAN 1, 1986

If Raymond is correct, all of women's behavioreven friendships with other femalesis informed by their self-images as passive, secondary creatures in a male-dominated world. But despite this burden, she maintains, some women in various times and places have developed their innate capacity for intense same-sex friendships, with or without homoerotic components. Raymond looks at the lives of medieval nuns who formed spiritual and emotional ties in convents that gave them independence from a man's world. She examines the 19th century Chinese phenomenon of "marriage resisters'': rural women who banded together after leaving their husbands or refusing to marry at all. Her radical feminist critique is, unfortunately, vague on how women's friendships might transform patriarchal social structures and bind women's lives together. The study is a mixture of impassioned rhetoric, jargon and tough-minded analysis. February 1