Barbara Caine recounts a powerful friendship between two working women in early 20th century Britain. Eva & Ruth found friendship in their shared love of books – in the words of George Eliot & Charlotte Brontë – but most importantly in each other, as they sought and struggled to create new and fuller lives.
Early modern women and men possessed complex capacities for friendship, love, and devotion, and the nuances of these partnerships defy and challenge our received assumptions about early modern heterosexual and heterosocial relationships. Amanda E. Herbert explores radical friendship in 17th century Britain…
Hélène Maloigne shows how archaeology, and especially fieldwork, depends on communication, collaboration and, importantly, friendship.
What is friendship worth, how might it be valued, and could it count in the context of immigration control? How might valuing friendship contribute to a wider critique of ‘the family’? And how might an appreciation of intimacy, friendship and care beyond the nuclear family provide a challenge to the ‘blood and soil’ thinking of race and nation?
The opening stages of the French Revolution helped generate widespread enthusiasm for reform in Britain. It did so especially amongst a group of intellectual and literary women and men who contributed to the emerging ‘revolution controversy’ in pamphlets, poetry and novels and were bonded together by acquaintance and friendship in an increasingly febrile political atmosphere.
There are many stories of friendship during the miners’ strike. The importance of this was in part the sense – in the middle of extraordinary hostility from multiple directions – that they weren’t alone. The long-term, mutual and egalitarian relationships signalled by the word ‘friendship’ during the miners’ strike should be embedded in our organising, anticipating the type of world we want to make.
