A review by leorahm
Girl Talk: What Science Can Tell Us about Female Friendship by Jacqueline Mroz
2.0
While there is some interesting science cited throughout, this book suffers heavily from a strictly white, American perspective and disorganization of content. If you’re looking for an intersectional book about female friendships this is not it. And as other reviews have mentioned, a lot of the book is about friendship generally, not about female friendship specifically.
The first chapter sets this book up to be Western (mostly American) and white, without a shred of the intersectionality that the phrase “the true nature of female friendship” promised. Chapter 1 is meant to be a brief historical overview of the context of female friendship. Instead, it’s a weird laundry list of examples, mostly English and colonial/white American. It doesn’t even touch on matriarchal systems (Africa, Asia or Latin/South America). No mention at all of indigenous women. Blows past friendships between slaves and says nothing about the power, strength, and necessity of Black female friendship in any decade. Talks about Quakers, witches and Victorian white women and then switches weirdly to specific famous friendships, including “Mrs. Lincoln and a Former Slave” instead of using Elizabeth Keckley’s name in the subtitle. There is one random section about female communal living in a specific part of China that includes a problematic phrase about a Chinese (do you mean Mandarin? Cantonese? Specific dialect?) word for “female” being “slave,” when really it’s more the other way around if you’re going to try to use that linguistic quirk as evidence for something. I cannot believe the lack of exploration and representation of a topic that is billed as being so broad and universal. The chapter begins with female friendships in the context of Ancient Rome and Greece, the Bible, and nuns. Are you really telling me that female friendships were not important or that you did zero research in nomadic societies, in Africa, the birthplace of humanity, or in any indigenous cultures where child rearing alone is highly shared??Women weren’t friends (or you you didn’t look for evidence) until convents the Middle Ages?! No buying it.
The chapter on the evolution of friendship mostly focuses on animals, but at one point in a paragraph about lions there’s a random sentence about “young girls in Africa” also grooming each other. Which begs the question of why this is included here? The implication being that these human girls are comparable to non-human animals. The chapter on men vs. women is full of gender generalizations that I find questionable given my own experiences, and lots of reinforcing negative gender stereotypes.
There’s a whole chapter on friendship in “other cultures” which reaffirms the fact that, although not stated or clarified in the book’s description or introduction, it’s about white, American friendship. One section at he very end of the book addresses race, but it’s not exactly comprehensive and it’s something that would have been better threaded throughout.
There is definitely some interesting material throughout the book, but for me it’s eclipsed by the white, colonial lens and the disorganization of the writing. There is a bibliography at the end, but no footnotes or endnotes to clarify support for any of the statements made. And there are random tidbits shoved into sections that don’t make sense, like the author couldn’t figure out where else to put them. There are tons of redundancies and repetitive ideas, as well as the use of names and anecdotes that are either hard to follow (who is this person again?) or don’t add much to the concepts being discussed. While some of the science cited is definitely fascinating and I feel very grateful for my friends and the experiences that I’ve had that are different from those described in the book, I found myself questioning the author’s interpretation of these studies a lot.
The first chapter sets this book up to be Western (mostly American) and white, without a shred of the intersectionality that the phrase “the true nature of female friendship” promised. Chapter 1 is meant to be a brief historical overview of the context of female friendship. Instead, it’s a weird laundry list of examples, mostly English and colonial/white American. It doesn’t even touch on matriarchal systems (Africa, Asia or Latin/South America). No mention at all of indigenous women. Blows past friendships between slaves and says nothing about the power, strength, and necessity of Black female friendship in any decade. Talks about Quakers, witches and Victorian white women and then switches weirdly to specific famous friendships, including “Mrs. Lincoln and a Former Slave” instead of using Elizabeth Keckley’s name in the subtitle. There is one random section about female communal living in a specific part of China that includes a problematic phrase about a Chinese (do you mean Mandarin? Cantonese? Specific dialect?) word for “female” being “slave,” when really it’s more the other way around if you’re going to try to use that linguistic quirk as evidence for something. I cannot believe the lack of exploration and representation of a topic that is billed as being so broad and universal. The chapter begins with female friendships in the context of Ancient Rome and Greece, the Bible, and nuns. Are you really telling me that female friendships were not important or that you did zero research in nomadic societies, in Africa, the birthplace of humanity, or in any indigenous cultures where child rearing alone is highly shared??Women weren’t friends (or you you didn’t look for evidence) until convents the Middle Ages?! No buying it.
The chapter on the evolution of friendship mostly focuses on animals, but at one point in a paragraph about lions there’s a random sentence about “young girls in Africa” also grooming each other. Which begs the question of why this is included here? The implication being that these human girls are comparable to non-human animals. The chapter on men vs. women is full of gender generalizations that I find questionable given my own experiences, and lots of reinforcing negative gender stereotypes.
There’s a whole chapter on friendship in “other cultures” which reaffirms the fact that, although not stated or clarified in the book’s description or introduction, it’s about white, American friendship. One section at he very end of the book addresses race, but it’s not exactly comprehensive and it’s something that would have been better threaded throughout.
There is definitely some interesting material throughout the book, but for me it’s eclipsed by the white, colonial lens and the disorganization of the writing. There is a bibliography at the end, but no footnotes or endnotes to clarify support for any of the statements made. And there are random tidbits shoved into sections that don’t make sense, like the author couldn’t figure out where else to put them. There are tons of redundancies and repetitive ideas, as well as the use of names and anecdotes that are either hard to follow (who is this person again?) or don’t add much to the concepts being discussed. While some of the science cited is definitely fascinating and I feel very grateful for my friends and the experiences that I’ve had that are different from those described in the book, I found myself questioning the author’s interpretation of these studies a lot.