Berkeley Voices: From Victorian-era letters to Swiftie bracelets, an evolution of American friendship

Anne Brice (narration): This is Berkeley Voices. I’m Anne Brice.

(Music: “Mazamorra” by Blue Dot Sessions)

If you’ve ever seen letters from the 1800s, it’s striking how differently Americans communicated with each other compared to today. Aside from the pristine penmanship and grammar, the way friends expressed their fondness for each other is remarkable.

Sarah Gold McBride: The leisure worlds of men and women were, in many ways, more separate, especially by the late 19th century, and therefore norms of homosocial friendship and the kind of language to communicate that friendship were different, too.

Anne Brice (narration): Sarah Gold McBride is a UC Berkeley historian and lecturer in American studies who specializes in the social and cultural history of the 19th century United States.

Sarah Gold McBride:Letters sent between friends are often full of the kinds of loving and affectionate language that today we would only associate with romantic or sexual relationships: “My darling,” “I love you,” “I can’t wait to be near you.” You know, these kinds of really romantic sentiments.

And on the one hand, it is fully possible that people who are writing to each other in these ways expressed physical intimacy with each other in ways that we would now recognize as a sexual relationship.

But it is also the case that norms of homosocial, meaning friendship between people of the same gender, norms of homosocial-emotional communication were different in the past than they are in the present.

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Anne Brice (narration): This semester, Gold McBride is coteaching a class about friendship in America with anthropologist Christine Palmer, a senior lecturer in American studies who specializes in 20th century popular and mass culture. She’s also the associate director of the American Studies program.

The academics — who are friends themselves — created the course in 2022 as a way to explore how the depiction of friendship in popular culture and media has shifted throughout history, and what it looks like today.

Sarah Gold McBride: Friendship is something that is so in the water we swim in, it is so easy to take for granted, to either take it not seriously or to presume that friendship basically means the same thing in different times, in different places and different cultures and communities.

And so my goal, especially when teaching about the past, is to make it feel both unfamiliar and familiar at the same time, for students to see all the ways in which our own experiences of love, friendship, work, faith, culture, etc. are different from people who lived in the past, but also to see commonalities between the past and the present.

Anne Brice (narration): To do this, Gold McBride and Palmer have their students look at all sorts of media, from letters between writers Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten in the 1920s to the 1991 movie Thelma and Louise to the 2021 book Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close.

One of the things Gold McBride and Palmer talk about with their students is how we communicate, or maybe don’t communicate so well, our affection for our friends in current American culture. It’s something that especially resonates with male students, says Gold McBride.

Sarah Gold McBride: We talk about, in some of our lectures, about masculinity and friendship and the way that, in some cases, norms of contemporary American masculinity, although I think this is changing now, stigmatize or resist affections of emotional closeness to a friend or might characterize such confessions as queer love instead of platonic friendship, and how we might use this investigation of friendship as an opportunity to encourage our students to be more expressive or more open to expressions of affection and love for friends, even those that they aren’t romantically involved with.

(Music: “Anders” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (narration): It’s not only shifts in norms and attitudes that influence how we make friends and maintain friendships, Palmer says. The modes of communication that we use to stay in touch with each other also have a big impact on what our friendships look like.

Christine Palmer: We have one class session where we talk about the relationship between friendship and material culture. Our students were really captivated by the telephone I decided to talk about the Princess telephone, which was I think first manufactured in 1959. The advertising for it was aimed particularly at teenage girls.

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Audio from a TV ad: This is the room of a princess — a teenage princess — because she has a personal extension phone for the privacy and personal freedom teenagers want and need.

Christine Palmer: The phones were these pastel colors — pinks and canary yellow and robin’s egg blue, designed to fit into the frilly aesthetics of a teen girl’s room. But the ads are very pointed in placing the telephone as a marker of friendship, as a tool of making and maintaining friendship.

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They might be talking about boys and their boyfriends, but they were never in the ads talking to their boyfriends, which I think is really interesting and important.

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Anne Brice (narration): If handwritten letters are a souvenir of friendship in the 19th century, and the princess telephone is an artifact of what friendship looked like in the 20th century, then what would represent what modern friendship looks like?

UC Berkeley News writer Lila Thulin, who coproduced this episode, asked the professors.

Lila Thulin: If you were going to select readings or artifacts to tell a story about where friendship is in this current moment, you know, you’re going to put it in a museum case or make everyone read it on a museum wall, what would it be and why?

Christine Palmer: That’s such a good question, Lila. I might want to include the Beyoncé and Miley Cyrus duet from Cowboy Carter, “The II Most Wanted,” in part because it is absolutely a friend anthem, but it also has a dynamic that’s similar to a film that we actually explore in our course, which is Thelma and Louise. It is sort of the musical 21st century journey that Thelma and Louise sort of take.

I mean, there’s no driving over the edge of a cliff at the end of the song, but there’s this intimacy between these two women in this car driving down the 405 that captures friendship in an interesting way.

And that is about a kind of love, and a complicated love. I love you, I’m sick of you, get your hand off of me, touch me. You know, this sort of thing. So I probably want that track somewhere in this museum of friendship.

Sarah Gold McBride: I would maybe make a display case full of friendship bracelets exchanged at the Eras store. That captures two elements of contemporary friendship, one: parasocial relationships, which is something we talk about in our class, and the way that Taylor Swift, in particular, has really made herself a friend to all of her fans in such a way — in her lyrics, in the individual relationships she has cultivated with specific fans and the way that themes of friendship between fans and the act of making a bracelet, making a whole arm of bracelets specifically to exchange with other fans at a concert.

It’s such a beautiful act of an object as a carrier of friendship, which is something we talk about in the class, as well. But it straddles this really interesting middle ground between parasocial friendships and in real life, IRL, friendships, as well. So I think that would definitely need to go in the friendship museum.

(Music: “Neatly Folded” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (narration): One distinctly modern facet of friendship in the 21st century is social media, says Palmer. While social media can make it easier to connect with people who have similar interests, like it does for Taylor Swift fans, it can also make it easier to forget what it takes to build and keep meaningful relationships.

Christine Palmer: I hear quite often a lot of anxiety from our students about, “How do I make friends? How do I keep friends? How do I even know who could possibly be a friend?” And that just seems to be something that intensifies once you’re out of the bubble of people who are the same age. What happens when you’re out in the working world? Are those friendships in the workplace, or are they something else?

So the dynamics of collecting friends via something like Facebook, where Facebook made “friend,” which is often understood as a noun, into a verb, and it became about the number of friends one had, as opposed to the quality or the depth of the friendship. And of course then it morphs into followers, followers replacing friends, and these sort of parasocial relationships that people develop.

Anne Brice (narration): Those dynamics have changed the way young people approach friendship today, and not always for the better. But Gold McBride says that by interrogating friendship throughout history, students can reflect on how their modern friendships feel, and perhaps think about them in a deeper way than they had before.

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Sarah Gold McBride: I think one thing that really comes through in the course is the idea of the intentionality that friendship needs, that there’s a way in which friendship can be taken for granted.

I think social media makes that easier, that we can almost let our friendships simmer without being tended to. And I think there’s something, perhaps for some students, about seeing how much labor and how much work it takes to maintain a friendship when your mode of connection is writing a letter back and forth, and every single page you write is priced separately, and so every little space is precious, and you have to put the letter in the envelope and go to the post office because there’s no home delivery before the Civil War. And you have to put the letter in that post office box, and then you have to wait until the mail comes back, the care and the time and the labor and the intentionality to maintain that friendship.

Perhaps seeing examples of how people have gone to great lengths to do so in the past will inspire them to tend to their own friendships with similar intentionality.

(Music: “Etude 8 Dimitri” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Christine Palmer: I’m smiling now because I am remembering one student who did tell me that they had started working on improving their penmanship so that they could actually start writing letters to their friends, which I thought was so sweet, so touching.

Anne Brice (narration): Gold McBride and Palmer say that even though friendship in America has transformed significantly throughout history, you can still see many of the same characteristics in today’s friendships.

Sarah Gold McBride: I remember, once, I had a student who said, “Gosh, I always assumed people who lived 150 years ago were all very prim and proper” — you know, the sort of greatest hits you see in a textbook — “but they’re just as messy and petty and silly as we are today.” I love that comment. (Laughs)

I think friendship is a topic that really surfaces that — that people in 1860, they’re just people. (Laughs) Their technologies are different, their forms of dress are different, the kinds of media they’re interacting with are different, but they’re just people. And I think friendship is so helpful as a way in for helping our students center their curiosity about the culture that we are all part of in the United States.

Anne Brice (outro): I’m Anne Brice, and this is Berkeley Voices, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs at Berkeley. This episode was created by me and Lila Thulin. You can find the show on most podcast listening apps or on YouTube @BerkeleyNews.

To read a transcript of the episode and to see photos of the Princess telephone and other texts mentioned in this episode, and for a link to Gold McBride’s upcoming book on the history of hair, visit UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts. A link to the site is also in our show notes.

This was the fifth episode of our series on transformation. In eight episodes, we’re exploring how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes of the series come out on the last Monday of each month.

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