Book Review: And Then We Were Women

Title: And Then We Were Women

Author: Dee Brestin

Publisher: Victor

Date: 1994

ISBN: 1-56476-343-9

Length: 175 pages

Quote: “Oliker found that, rather than siding with the wife against the husband, a woman is much more likely to…strengthen her friend’s marriage by helping her to see the situation from his perspective…or by diffusing her anger with humor.”

I've found that airing a disagreement, though generally a bad idea, is a good way to test the sincerity of a female friend. If the complaint were something like "He hit me and broke two ribs," a good friend will say "Don't go back to that house tonight." If it's the sort of disagreement couples usually have, the friend who doesn't say "Oh, forgive him!" is licking her lips. Lose her.

Some women have that kind of friends. Some do not. If they let themselves be sucked into the corporate nomad lifestyle, it won’t matter; they won’t stay in one place long enough to have time-tested friendships anyway. Considering this, I’m not sure why churches need a Bible study guide on the topic of women’s friendships. The Bible says relatively little about women’s friendships, specifically (though it affirms the value of the one it notices) and, frankly, whether “friends” are same-sex or opposite-sex does not determine their potential for damage to marriage. Sincere Christians respect their friends’ marriages. Insincere Christians don’t and whether same-sex friends form “bi-curious” sexual relationships (less common), or flop into bed with their friends’ mates (more common), or just introduce unhappiness into the home through envy or gossip, is not the sole determining factor of the damage done to any children affected.

However, some church groups just like to hold weeknight Bible studies, and what’s wrong with reading Scriptures about marriage and trustworthiness?

One thing: This book seems to aim at solving problems that I've not seen in the real world. I've not seen a lot of fear that women's groups are going to encourage all the women to leave their husbands and move into a big feminist commune. In real life even feminist consciousness-raising groups did not actually want to do that. Serious feminists know that the changes that benefit women have to work for women who are at home with babies, and the sort of idiotic idealist feminists who think it might be possible, or desirable, to lock all the men up and make them raise all the babies, have neither the organizational skills nor the money to organize the communes they fantasize about. And real church ladies' Bible study groups are more concerned about (1) getting people motivated to show up every week, and (2) reminding them to focus on the Bible rather than on gossip.

"The story of Hannah teaches us that...?"

"Hannah in the Bible wasn't drunk when she bowed down in silent prayer, but Hannah Mae Smith got drunk at her sister's graduation party and..." 

I think this book could have been improved by a more careful study of C.S. Lewis’s Four Loves (or Five Loves), which distinguishes between philia (the “higher” kind of friendship based on shared interests and synergistic partnership) and storge (the “lower,” more primal, affection we feel for things, places, and people just because they are familiar).

There are women, for whom Gwen Macsai was speaking when she wrote a thoroughly forgettable book called Lip Shtick, whose idea of female friendship is definitely storge. These women bond by screaming around the partitions about exactly what they’re doing in public restrooms. Any two of them can bond because all of them not only have the same bodiy functions but like to chatter about them. Body-babbling is a symptom of a more serious disease: these women tend to resent difference, especially the differences between them and women who have talent, interests, personalities, or taste. 

The body-babbler type of "girl friends" take a lowest-common-denominator approach to a lot of things. As in Erma Bombeck’s story, they were the gals who sat around kaffeeklatsching about how hard it was to be good homemakers, who snubbed the woman who liked homemaking and did it well. They believe that “a friend doesn’t go on a diet when you’re fat.” Any woman who wants to claim these women as “friends” is doomed to a lifetime of “cozy,” familiar whining about being fat, living in messy houses, not feeling really close to their husbands, having unsatisfactory jobs or none, having old people’s diseases at early ages…Not that this type of women aren’t even worse if they’re allowed to clump together in offices, where if the company hires anyone who is honest, efficient, and dedicated, they make it their goal to get that person fired. Women who say that they don’t like women, or don’t usually like women, have these frightful females in mind.

There are women whose main concern in some social groups, at least, will always be to keep a good healthy distance from the body-babblers. They may be our neighbors; relatives, or childhood friends, but they’re not the friends, in the sense of philia, whom we really love for themselves and not for the sake of childhood memories. Our friends are synergistic partners in things we do. We love them for life but, since people move apart, grow apart, and die, we don’t necessarily have them for life…and the places they leave behind are not filled by tedious kaffeeklatsching.

A book about how, although women who’ve had “real friends” probably would at least send food to the emergency shelter if a kaffeeklatscher’s house burned down, our goal is actually to avoid cluttering our days with kaffeeklatsching conversation, might be helpful to the women who “just don’t know what to say to” us. They don’t have to say anything, someone could tell them. Probably, the less they say to us, the better. If our work involves selling anything they can buy it. Otherwise they should go their own way, unless, and until, they decide they want to turn off the useless gabble and focus on doing something as well as it deserves to be done.

Kaffeeklatschers have been known to decide to “befriend” some apparently “lonely, friendless” person who may or may not have a satisfactory social life (as it might be when successful artists or business people go back to church) but whose social life does not, in any case, include them. The best-case outcome, when this happens, is that the person snubs them tactfully and continues to avoid them charitably. At this point the kaffeeklatschers usually hiss and spit. “She’s such a snob!”

Synergistic friendship is the great breaker-down of demographic barriers. People who love working together don’t care about each other’s age, race, income or even sex lives, and if what they do together involves humanitarian work their friendship is likely to cross religious boundaries too…but irrelevant chatter is clutter, to be swept away.

I think this book could also have been improved by a closer look at the recent psychological and neurological research that was becoming available by 1994. If Brestin was going to discuss the idea of people “being” “left-brained” or “right-brained,” she might have discussed the newer studies indicating that people can profit from learning to use more of their brains; that women, too, can learn to process our awareness of reality through our left frontal lobes and make logical decisions without muddling through hours of babble about emotions. Not only is this more efficient, not only does it help others to perceive us as mature adults, but it does not interfere with our ability to wallow in feelings. We can still enjoy rooting for the school team, crying at weddings, and screaming with pleasure in bed.

Some logical left-brained men need to discipline themselves to get their natural share of enjoyment of their gardens, their dogs, and even their children. Women have had less cultural conditioning to need to work on that but some women still need to learn to deal with things that frighten them rather than being paralyzed by unnecessary fears. Friends can actually help each other…In 1994 I knew a woman who had been so terrorized by an incident of casual sexual harassment, on the way to a job twenty years ago, that she hadn’t had another job since 1974. A good group of female friends at church could have eliminated the public nuisance as well as encouraging this woman to venture out of her home. That’s not discussed in the Bible, directly, though when we read of teenaged girls as well as boys “keeping the sheep” we can be sure that those children had been trained to react to sexual terrorism in ways other than panic, but the Bible does not directly discuss whether little girls play in “more cooperative” ways than little boys do, either.

As it stands, I think And Then We Were Women is a nice, light, shallow little book for those who like to call their kaffeeklatsches either “book club” or “Bible study,” with nice little anecdotes about other nice church ladies and their daughters, but little actual information. Some phrasing (like “a rare right-brained man” in the acknowledgments) was outdated and fed the myth that church has more to offer people who didn’t get the benefit of much education. Overall this book was derivative, and not even of the most respectable sources, at that. Breskin fitted a few short Bible studies into the clichés of the commercial media, threw in a few nice little stories about her family, and called it a Bible study. Well, Beth Moore, Elisabeth Elliot, or Liz Curtis Higgs she was not.

Readers can still enjoy this book as light reading, perhaps a reminder to think good thoughts and practice what they already knew they ought to do. It’s not a book to inform or persuade, although it was marketed as one. It is a book to entertain.