Can women be friends? The men in my own family commonly expressed the opinion that they could not. Oddly enough, the females they lived with always had girl friends. Eventually I came to understand that, in the minds of many men, “girl friends” are like “women doctors;” that is, second rate. At the same time, I have known fathers who actively discouraged their girl children from forming friendships. I have known husbands who went to great lengths to destroy their wives’ friendships. Why is female camaraderie treated, on the one hand, as frivolous, and on the other hand, as dangerous?
     A friend can be someone to share a good time with, someone who will hide you if you are running away from an abusive father or husband (or mother), a person who gives support and comfort. Friendship can also be empowering. It was a group of friends who started the suffragettes on their way to winning the vote for women; it was a group of friends who launched the feminist movement. Change in any society requires organized effort, and at the root of most social movements are a group of like-minded friends. So perhaps female friendship has been belittled for the same reason that women’s intelligence, artistic abilities, courage, and worth have been.
     Until the latter decades of the 20th Century, women bonded in those (confining) spaces that a patriarchal culture had long, long ago defined as women’s “place” (i.e., the bearing and rearing of children, the care of husbands and elderly relations). Single women also bonded so they might travel together, for reasons of physical safety and to preserve reputation. As women’s roles in society expanded into areas previously the domain of men only, they began to depend on friends in new ways. Women networked, they counseled one another on business and professional issues, they began to give one another political and financial support.
     Psychologists have noted that women deny that they compete with their friends. Competitive is a verb that women are still uneasy about claiming as an feminine attribute. Of course, women are competitive; although they have been taught from birth to believe that they were created to be support staff. During the centuries when women’s principal focus in life was finding and keeping a husband, sexual competition was the greatest threat to a friendship; and the theft of a boyfriend or a husband was the most treacherous and unforgiveable betrayal. This too is changing. Women now also compete for jobs, for position, for money, for reputation, for personal power. They have to deal with competition in ways their mothers and grandmothers did not imagine.
     The story that follows is about a friendship of many years duration. This friendship was forged between the two feminist movements. It describes the important role women played in each other’s lives before their roles began to change significantly in the 1970s. This friendship plays out in the ordinary, everyday events of life: house cleaning, childbearing and rearing, caring for elderly parents, shopping, playing cards. Anne Regets lived her entire life in the small coal town of her birth. As a girl, she yearned for close female friendship. She describes her desire as wanting to have a sister; meaning, I believe, a platonic relationship with someone who is not a competitor, yet one as intense as a blood bond (that is, a bond that does not fade and cannot be easily broken by distance, time or changing circumstances). Sophie Bagdon, her friend, was born in an industrial city. When they met, Anne was a teenager, but married; Sophie Bagdon was in her mid-twenties, single, and passionately involved as a nurse with the public health movement.
     Anne is candid about their relationship, how they helped one another navigate life’s major transitions and turning points, what they meant to one another, how they strengthened one another. In addition to the values of friendship, Anne is frank about the ways misunderstanding can wreck a friendship, and how rifts can be mended even after many years. The depth of feeling will make you think about your own friends and friendships, past and present.
     Letters on the subject of women’s friendship, the joys, the competition and how it is handled or mishandled, the betrayals, and your perceptions of how the relationship is changing are invited for the TALK TO US page.

ANNE REGETS
Soph

I’d always wanted a sister, all my life. Soph became the sister I never had, and I don’t think real sisters could have been as close as we were.
     Margaret, my brother John’s first wife, and Soph were very good friends. Margaret and John were living then down at Millsboro, and it was at their house that I met Soph. She was in her mid-twenties. She was Sophie Bagdon then, it was before she married. I was seven years younger and already married.
     Soph was a public health nurse. She drove a car, she had her own car when not many women did. She had done her nurses’ training at West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh, and she had lived and worked in New York City before she came to Vestaburg as a nurse for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. John was an agent for Metropolitan, and he’d introduced Soph to Margaret, and she got to be a friend of the family.
     I really started to know her when my son, Bernard, was born. Andy and I were living in Rices Landing in a tiny two-room house, and Margaret brought Soph up to take care of me and the baby. Soph taught me how to bathe him. Mother and Lizzy had showed me how to do it the way the old people did, but Soph taught me how to sponge him without putting the baby in a tub. She showed me how to take care of his ears. When Bernard was sick, Soph used to come to the house and take care of him. Insurance companies hired nurses to do that in those days-take care of policyholders and teach.
     Well, Margaret kept getting sick. Some people didn’t take it seriously, but Soph did and she tried to help her. Margaret was pregnant, and Soph discovered that she had a heart condition. She visited Margaret at home, kept checking her, kept taking her to the doctors and questioning them. She told John how serious Margaret was. She told Margaret how serious she was.
     When Margaret died, Soph bought her daughters new white dresses for the funeral. She took me with her to Brownsville to get them. Over the months, we became closer because Soph used to come up to see Margaret’s kids when they lived at my mother’s house, and she came to see my kids.
     Soph delivered both of my girls. She took care of me when I was in the hospital. She took care of my kids when they were sick, always. We babysat for each other. I always felt my mother shouldn’t have to raise my kids, so if I needed a baby sitter, I asked Soph. And vice versa. I was her daughter’s godmother. When our kids were little, we were just like a family. We used to go to their house. They came to ours.
     We went on vacations together. Soph liked to travel. Before my daughter Betty was born, Soph took me to Niagara Falls with her. We went to Atlantic City together. Another time, we took the kids up to Wakefield-on-the-Lake in New York for a week’s vacation and we stayed in a cabin down by the lake.
     One thing about Soph, she was very determined. She always did what she wanted to do. She didn’t care too much about what somebody else had, and what other people said or did never bothered her. She loved her family, but she didn’t get as much love back from them as she wanted.
     I think I knew Soph better than anybody else in the world. She didn’t make friends easily because she was reserved in a lot of her ways. You had to want to know her. She was friendly and she liked people, but she didn’t become intimate easily. She would not force herself on anybody, and it never bothered her if you didn’t want to be her friend. Some women she knew in nurses’ training stayed friends with her until they died. After she married, she didn’t see her old friends very much. Soph always said she didn’t have time for friends. On her days off from the hospital, she had too much work at home.
     Soph wanted a few friends, but she wanted true friends. To her, quantity wasn’t what mattered. She wanted quality, and that’s what she gave. If you were her friend, you were her friend. She’d put herself out for you, and she didn’t expect in return. She did it because she wanted to. And she really enjoyed doing for others. There wasn’t a selfish bone in her body. If she could do something for you, she did it because she wanted to, or because it was the right thing to do. She didn’t do it because she wanted something from you in return.
     Soph was honest, even if she had to hurt your feelings. She wouldn’t lie to you or cheat you if her life depended on it. If you were wrong, you were wrong, and if she needed to tell you, or if she was asked, she said it. If she didn’t like something, she’d tell you. If she knew something she thought would help you, she’d tell you. No matter what I told her, no matter what I asked her, I knew that what she said, in her opinion, that was it. I had no more questions.
     Everybody has faults. Soph was demanding. Not domineering, just demanding. There’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, if you were going to do something you were going to do it right or you didn’t need to do it at all. With Soph, black was black, white was white. You didn’t say black was gray, because gray was a color all its own. If she knew something and was approached, she said it like it was. If she was wrong, she would apologize. Some people liked her for it, and some people didn’t.
     About a year after Margaret died, Soph got involved with my brother. They went together for several years, but John wasn’t in any hurry to re-marry. He was comfortable enough the way things were. His kids had a home with my mother. The ladies were out for him. Girls came to see me-well, they pretended they came to see me, but they really wanted to see him. They didn’t care if he did have two children. Soph came to the conclusion that the relationship had no future, and she asked her company for a transfer. They sent her to Bristol, Pennsylvania. After she moved, she stayed in touch with me, and she used to come and get me, and I would spend a week with her. Just me and Bernard with her in Bristol. A week.
     My mother adored Soph and she always feared John might meet somebody else. Finally Mother talked to him. After that, John drove down to Bristol and asked her. I still have their wedding picture, John and Soph with me and her brother, Adolph. Adolph was the best man, and I was her matron of honor. The wedding was very small, just family. They were married in Sacred Heart, the church my father helped build. Soph wore a royal blue lace dress with a jacket. I wore a blue dress with a jacket too. The reception was a dinner at my mother’s house.
     My parents' house didn't have a bathroom indoors, just an outhouse. Before Soph's wedding, she and John bought a house on Bayard Avenue, and Soph put in a bathroom and a new furnace and she wallpapered the walls and painted. She had that house all fixed up and furnished and all their things moved in before the wedding. After the ceremony, she and John and the girls went right into their own house.
     We used to share our housecleaning. I’d go over and we’d clean her house, then she’d come down and we’d clean mine. She always said it was easier that way. I used to say, “This isn’t any easier. It’s still just work.” But she’d say, “Oh Anna, it’s more fun to do it together.”
     The year before my daughter Lucretia was born, Soph did all my house cleaning for me. She took care of my mother when she was sick in bed at my house. I had poison ivy on my hands and couldn’t bathe my mother, so Soph would come over and do it. And at the time she had her own mother sick over at her house. When my mother died, Soph consoled me.
     We built our house because of her. She said, “Anne, I think you and Andy should build.” She told me that different times. I told Andy, and he said, “With what?” At that time the mine wasn’t working very good and we had to cut back. I told Soph we didn’t have any money. She said, “I’m going to loan you the money.” She trusted us with money.
     When we moved into our new house, Soph and John and the girls were living on Bayard Avenue. But it wasn’t long until Soph decided to build a house in Dry Tavern. I told her, “We just now moved here close to you and now you’re moving up there.” She said, “Oh, Anna, that’s not very far.” Well, it wasn’t very far for her because she could drive a car. I couldn’t drive, so to me it was far. When she lived on Bayard Avenue, I could walk over to her house and see her.
     She saved my life. I used to have terrible attacks of pain. Soph knew I was having gallbladder attacks. I was twenty-four years old and I had a real bad attack, but I didn’t want to go to the hospital. She convinced me to have that operation. That wasn’t the only time she saved my life.
     Soph loved to nurse and she worked a lot at the hospital and she did private duty nursing. Old Dr. Bliss said that there are born nurses and nurses that are made, and he said Sophie was a born nurse. She was. I had wanted to be a nurse, but my parents said no, and I was married at fifteen. But my daughter Betty became a nurse and, like Soph, she loves her work too.
     There was never anything that I could have needed that Soph wouldn’t give me, or do for me. She was my friend, really and truly. She was somebody I could rely on. If I needed her, she was there, always. And I didn’t have to ask her. She knew when I needed her.
     We had some good times together. I think now how we used to play five hundred rummy, and I remember the trips we took to Pittsburgh “just to look.” Soph’d call me and say: We’re going to Pittsburgh. Make plans to go at a certain time, certain day. We would shop at all three department stores.
     I’ll never forget how fast she walked! I would be at the corner and she would be going up the steps already. She’d look back and say, “Come on, Anna.” And I’d say, “I can’t go that fast. My legs are too short.” So she’d wait for a little while, but before you knew it she was half-way there.
     We were friends for forty-one years, except for one episode, and that was a misunderstanding that had to do with the kids. I thought I was doing what was right, but Soph saw it differently and she was mad about it. She wouldn’t even sit in the same pew with me in church. If I sat down near her, she’d get up and move. One time, I went into Goldsmith’s Department Store in Waynesburg, and Soph was at the counter buying some fabric. When she saw me, she just turned and left the store. Left the material on the counter and walked out. I just burst into tears.
     That coldness lasted several years, until my brother had a heart attack. I called her then and asked if I could visit him in the hospital. She said, “Of course you can. He’s your brother.” She didn’t stay for my visit. When I came in the room, she left. Later, she told me I could see my brother as often as I wished, and after a few visits, we talked. When people can’t or won’t talk, so many things are held back and misunderstandings grow and people imagine all sorts of things that cause hard feelings. If people could just go to each other and talk, and listen, and try to understand what’s in the other person’s mind, so much heartache could be avoided.
     When she had her heart attack, Andy and I went to see her in the hospital. Now I know what it was like for her, because I have gone through it. I said to her, “You never thought you would be here as a patient, did you?” We didn’t know then that what she’d had was a heart attack because she had forbidden her doctor to tell us. Any of us. My brother, too. She told us she had gall bladder trouble.
     She came home for a week. I went over to get her laundry, and I found them both crying. John was doing the dishes. Soph could hardly walk. But she wouldn’t give in. She wouldn’t go to bed. The only way she could get around was by holding on to chairs.
     She kept wearing this one old dress, and when I took her clothes, she said, “Will you bring that dress back over to me.” She wanted that dress because it had pockets where she carried her nitroglycerin. She kept the bottle hidden in the pocket, and she would slip her hand in and fool with the bottle until she got that nitro out, and I’d see her sneak that pill. But then I didn’t know what it was. John didn’t know why she was always wearing that dress, and he hated it. He said, “Don’t bring that dress back. She’s had it on for a week!” Well, I washed it and took it back to her.
     She said she had to go to the hospital in Pittsburgh, and she said, “Will you go with me?” I never will forget that she asked me to go to the hospital with her, that she wanted me to be with her.
     At the hospital in Pittsburgh there was construction, and we had to walk a long way to get to the entrance. Inside the hospital, we sat there and sat there and we couldn’t get anybody at the desk to admit her. Finally, she said, “I can’t sit here any more. I want to go to my room.” We couldn’t find anybody to get her a wheelchair. We had to walk up to her room. She undressed herself. I helped what little I could She would never let you help her. She went to bed because she was tired. John wasn’t in the room with us. He was still trying to get her registered into the hospital. We hadn’t seen a doctor yet. Not one of the nurses at the desk had come into that room.
     The other woman in the room smoked, and Soph said, “I’m going to have to move.” She couldn’t stand cigarette smoke. I went out to speak to the nurses about changing her room, but they said the woman would be going home the next day.
     Soph started to vomit. She was too weak to go to the bathroom and I had to get her the bed pan. I took the pan away to empty it, and she said, “Is it bile or food?” I said, “There’s pieces of your pickle in here.” That was true because the last thing she did before she left her home, she just had to have a pickle sandwich, two slices of bread and a pickle. She loved dill pickles. Really, it was mostly bile in the bedpan.
     She felt a little bit better after that, and she talked to me. John was out in the hall trying to find a doctor. Soph didn’t want him in the room. She told me, “I don’t want John to see me in this condition. Keep him out of the room.” I think she was afraid she was going have a heart attack right then. She said to me, “If anything happens to me, he’s not to be by himself. He should remarry.”
     See, she suspected she was going to die. And I didn’t! Just then it still didn’t register on me how bad she was. No, she didn’t realize it either, because she said, “I’m going home.” She was supposed to have tests done the next day.
     She told me to take John home with me. She was worried about him. She said, “Don’t let him be alone.” As we were leaving, she said, “You come back with John in the morning, will you?” I said yes. John stayed at my home that night, and we had just gone to bed when the telephone call came. Now I kick myself. But I didn’t know then what was wrong, how serious she was.
     Afterward, I said I just wished I had stayed that night with her. She wanted me to go with her to the hospital. She called me and asked me to go. But I couldn’t leave Andy alone. See, Andy had a heart condition, he couldn’t be left alone. Well, I could have stayed. If it came to that, I could have asked somebody to stay with Andy, and I could have stayed with her. But I didn’t realize how bad she was.
     I know I couldn’t have prevented her death, but if I had stayed, at least she wouldn’t have been alone! She’s been dead for twenty years, but that’s what always hurts me, that she had to be alone. She shouldn’t have been alone.
     I always say how much I need her now. Every year on the anniversary of her death I light a candle and I have a mass said for her.
     It’s a long time she’s been gone. She was only sixty-four when she died. I think about how she took care of my brother and forgot to take care of herself. After his heart attack the doctors gave him only ten years to live, and that was thirty years ago. Boy! She measured his food and weighed it. If she saw him sneaking something he shouldn’t have, she’d grab it out of his hand, even in front of company. She’d say, “You’re not supposed to eat that.” She had time for everybody but herself.
     I miss her. I feel sorry for myself that I don’t have her because, like I said, all my life I had wanted a sister, and she was closer than most sisters. I was never as close to anybody as I was to Soph. Not ever, anybody, before or since. I could go to her for anything. She seemed to know my needs better than I did myself. She was always there, and she cared, and when you have somebody like that, it’s not easy to give them up.
     I’ll tell you this: When I die, I’m going to lie next to her. I saw to that when Andy died. He’s buried in our family plot, and when we arranged his funeral, I had them leave a space for me between Andy and Soph. That’s where I’m going to be, beside Andy and next to her.
     

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