In the simplest terms, friendship is often described as a state of enduring affection, esteem, intimacy and trust between two people, but women’s friendships, I’ve come to realize, carry far more weight than such definitions allow. They are some of the most formative spaces in my life, shaping not only who I am but also how I endure, how I find joy and how I make sense of the world.
For more than 10 years, my two best friends, who, in a funny coincidence, share the same name, have been my safe space. They are the people with whom I can be unapologetically myself, unguarded, sometimes unkempt, but always understood.
We were around 10 when we met, navigating school halls and the small dramas of childhood, but our friendship has endured far beyond those early years. We’ve shared quiet moments, laughter and occasional disagreements that somehow strengthened rather than weakened the bond.
For me, the bond was tested like never before when I spent a year abroad. The routines we had taken for granted, coffee dates and shared afternoons, were suddenly impossible. But somehow, even miles away, we never ran out of things to say. In fact, our conversations taught me more about myself than I realized at that time.
Across time zones, through them, I discovered patience, reflection and a sense of perspective I hadn’t had before. The distance revealed something profound. I saw how friendship shapes identity and teaches you how to carry people you love with you, even when you are apart from them.
Friendships are built on small things. Sometimes I catch myself repeating the same stories, same frustrations, things I have probably shared hundreds of times before. Somehow, I feel heard again and again. In those times, I realize that it’s not just me unloading my thoughts, it’s about knowing that no matter how many times I circle back to the same place, they are there for me. It’s comforting to be fully known and still fully welcomed.
When you are young, friendship is a way of making sense of the adult world; years later, it becomes a way of escaping its weight.
In my own life, friendships have been both ordinary and extraordinary.
I see now that what has sustained me personally is part of a long tradition of women leaning on one another, transforming intimacy into resilience and, ultimately, resistance.
Yet, despite being so central to our lives, women’s friendships have often been underestimated or dismissed as secondary. Women have relied on friendships as spaces of support and solidarity, even when society left little room for them. Historical records show us that many women took these encouragements seriously.
Amanda Herbert, historian of early Modern America at Durham University, shows that women’s friendships in the period roughly between 1450 and 1800 were more than simple companionship; they were lifelines. Early modern women were imagined as more emotional and loving than men, and social expectations encouraged them to maintain “better and stronger friendships and alliances.” This was a time of global expansion and upheaval, colonization, travel, and political instability, which disrupted traditional social bonds, leaving women responsible for holding families, communities and friendships together.
“To make and maintain friendships, [women] wrote thousands of letters. They talked, read, and prayed together. They took care of each other’s bodies: brushing hair, dressing, napping, and sharing meals. They took care of each other’s children. They hand-crafted clothes and jewellery and confections and gave them to one another as gifts. They shared strategic political information. They made medical recommendations.” – Amanda Herbert.
From letters exchanged between women in the 18th and 19th centuries to the networks of support among women activists, these relationships often provided safety, advice and emotional sustenance in societies that limited women’s autonomy.
But women’s friendships aren’t just intimate; they are deeply political. To choose one another, to nurture each other’s growth and wellbeing, is to resist a culture that has long tried to divide women through competition and silence.
This historical perspective resonates strongly with experiences closer to home. In Kosovo, too, women’s friendships have long been political. During the 1990s, under conditions of repression and war, women built networks to keep schools alive, document human rights violations and sustain communities. Out of them grew spaces like the Center for the Protection of Women and Children in Prishtina, founded by activists like Sevdije Ahmeti and Vjosa Dobruna. The center offered a safe space for women and children, a hub for feminist workshops and a place to document violations, transforming companionship into collective strength.
Grassroots activism extended beyond Prishtina. Women in rural regions, like Igballe and Safete Rugova, organized locally, producing radio theater shows, women’s newspapers and projects focused on girls’ education. They introduced prizes for poetry and prose, giving women a platform and encouraging them to find their voice.
Women like Sevdije Ahmeti, Vjosa Dobruna, Igballe Rugova and Safete Rugova transformed companionship into collective strength, building a movement in the most precarious of times. These were friendships that carried the weight of community, friendships that turned basements into meeting rooms and everyday care into the groundwork of resistance.
This is the heart of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political,’ a frequently-heard feminist phrase during the late 1960s and 1970s. It reminds us that the details of women’s lives: housework, childcare, sexuality and even friendships, are not just individual matters but are shaped by wider systems of power. What may seem like small and personal exchanges, conversations in kitchens, letters between friends, or time spent nurturing one another are anything but trivial. They, in fact, are political practices that challenge isolation and build solidarity.
So, when women sit together and speak about their lives, they are not merely exchanging stories. They are naming patterns of inequality, turning private pain into collective insight and exposing how the most intimate corners of existence are political terrain.
Feminist thinkers have long recognized this. For feminist scholar and activist bell hooks, solidarity was never something abstract. In her intersectional approach, hooks challenges narrow, white, middle-class understandings of feminism by instead bringing race, class and gender together.
For hooks, “sisterhood is not just a concept, it is a lived practice that sees the personal and political become inseparable. True solidarity requires us to focus on structures of power that shape our lives. In this struggle, friendship, care and support among women are themselves acts of resistance.
Even so, despite their significance, women’s friendships rarely took center stage in literature.
When they did, however, they revealed a lot about ambition, society and the bonds that sustain us. Just as friendships in activism and everyday life have been core spaces, the way they are recorded and remembered in letters, novels or screenplays matters deeply. They show us how society values the emotional and political labor embedded in these friendships.
In novels, the shift toward centering women’s friendships has been gradual, emerging after the Second World War with works like Stella Gibbons’s Westwood, Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything and Mary McCarthy’s The Group. These literary works have explored women’s lives, ambitions and the social pressures they face in a changing society.
This isn’t entirely new, however; Charlotte Brontë, for example, wrote to Elizabeth Gaskell in 1853:
“Thank you for your letter; it was as pleasant as a quiet chat, as welcome as spring showers, as reviving as a friend’s visit, in short, it was very like a page of Cranford.” The line could be read as a literary footnote, but it is also evidence of how vital these exchanges were for women whose public lives were constrained.
Media and popular culture rarely do justice to this complexity. Too often, these friendships are reduced to clichés, friends turned into jealous rivals, gossiping sidekicks or background characters in someone else’s story.
While still rare, there are films and television series that place women’s friendships at the center, showing them as bonds where women confront one another in ways that feel true to lived experience.
These representations matter because they mirror the historical and political realities of friendships between women. Just as historical and political contexts show women relying on each other for survival and resistance, literature and media reflect how society remembers these bonds. Thinking of these stories reminds me that women’s friendships are intimate, political and transformative. Perhaps the most radical truth is that when standing together, through words, stories and shared lives, women continue to create spaces of joy, resilience and power, quietly shaping not only themselves but the world around them.
I see this every day in my own life, in the laughter, honesty and support of my closest friends, in the everyday ways we care for one another. Through them, I recognize the same threads of care and solidarity that women across history have woven; they make it clear that these experiences are lived, felt and carried forward every day.
Want to support our journalism? Become a member of HIVE or consider making a donation. 