Women’s friendship in late eighteenth-century America and its relevance to lockdown

Rowan Cookson offers us the opportunity to compare our contemporary anxieties with a stressful era in American history.

Eighteenth-century women’s friendship is worth considering at this time. In my undergraduate dissertation, I concluded that white wealthy women’s friendship in eighteenth-century America equired long distance communication, involved labour and perpetuated race and class privilege. Here I explore these findings and parallels with Britain during lockdowns when many of us have not seen friends in person for months at a time and Black Lives Matter protests have ensured that conversations about structural racism have become mainstream...