Bread & Roses
It’s Women’s History Month.
Your social feeds are hopefully riddled with quotable captions from prominent women in our society, local libraries displaying titles about women of the past who led great change, and your monthly meetup or workplace honoring female stories. I’d like to add mine to the mix, hinging on a lesser-told story:
women don’t get along well with other women.
I’m aware of the perception that I’m a feminist due to the early years of my blog, Brave Girl. My mission was to empower other women to define their career standards while defining my own, then sharing those findings on my blog. My intention through it all was women supporting women, a now overused phrase. What I shared on-screen though started to contrast greatly with what I was actually experiencing with women in the workplace, freelance collaborations, and budding friendships.
Brave Girl became a container to hold what I didn’t have in my real life; healthy female friendship. I was facing a deep childhood wound head on, although I wasn’t consciously aware of it yet. It’s called trauma mastering. Where you try to replicate a traumatizing scenario and master it this time, to gain back the control you didn’t have the first time around.
My first female friendship in childhood robbed me of an innocence I wonder if I’ll always be trying to reclaim. It convoluted boundaries before I knew to form them. Muddling lines between what makes a good friend and how to know you’re being mistreated. I’ve been skeptical, possibly self-sabotaging, of female relationships ever since.
It makes sense then that the messaging of women empowering women, #metoo, and carry as you climb is confusing for me. It buzzes ever more loudly during Women’s History Month, specifically International Women’s Day (March 8). Some women don’t use these phrases with purity, especially when their career, finances, or family are involved. This is nothing to hide but for layered reasons, it’s exactly what I’ve experienced in many workplace situations and collaborations, ironically when the projects intend to highlight women and underrepresented groups. I don’t believe all women have good intentions just because they’re a woman. The expectation that I’m a supportive, kind, compassionate person only if I agree with all women by default of their femaleness is unrealistic.
Today I overheard two women on the trail. Before I could make out their words I made out thee tone, the tone universally recognized as bitching about another woman. As the duo got closer, the woman complaining started to break up her sentences as one does when they don’t want their gossip to be judged by a stranger. It was something about a fruit bowl and the friend in question had not brought enough of it. On purpose. To harm the event. As their Patagonia puffers swished forward quickly, the bitching about an invisible woman withholding sugar from the group seemed to bring the two women closer together.
Building a relationship whose connection relies on disdain for a third party — is this the norm for female friendship? What does it look like to attempt a new norm?
I don’t know what an ideal female friendship looks like. My past is riddled with friendships that soured and abruptly ended, ranging in reason from professional to petty. Please note I’m a devout fan of the Real Housewives, lest you think I’m trying to raise the reverb on Sisterhood. I also think it’s too easy to blame the patriarchy for all our problems. I’m asking with incredulous curiosity rooted in a deep childhood wound followed by repeated friendship fallouts — what makes a healthy woman?
What I read about women, conversations I’ve had lately, and the banter overheard in daily errands where mainly women frequent, is all about self-improvement. It suggests there’s a better version of me in the distance, far away from here, and if I can just add one more thing to the list of to-dos, I’ll be better. When the truth is I’m really ok as is.
A healthy woman is a quilt.
We are all pieces of one another. We hurt each other, we heal each other too. I don’t believe every female friendship is meant to be and that’s ok. Or it’s meant to be for some seasons and must fade away in others. Energies won’t always align 100% of the time, sometimes not at all.
I would love to get to a place where we don’t all have to align energies and form friendships to celebrate one another, but I’m not there yet. I see too many women glorifying some version of women supporting women in online spaces while manipulating and lacking accountability face-to-face. I have my own traits that don’t mesh easily across the board. I’d like to see this turned on its axis in my lifetime and I also need to honor I’m not seeing it yet.
As Leonard Cohen said, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” I have faith in the sentiment, but I’m gonna let myself move through this first.
*Bread and Roses originates from a speech given by Helen Todd, an American women’s suffrage activist in 1910. A line in her speech, “bread for all, and roses, too” inspired the title of a poem, Bread and Roses by James Oppenheim. Another prominent part of this speech:
Not at once; but woman is the mothering element in the world and her vote will go toward helping forward the time when life's Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice.
— Helen Todd, 1910.
Originally sent to Substack subscribers in March 2023.
