Throughout this book, I have been arguing for the presence of politicized women's friendship in the mid-seventeenth century. Later writers and readers cover up these traces, with their claims on the long tradition of civically engaged classical and humanist masculine friendship, effectively and eventually separating women's friendship from politics. From this depoliticization a familiar story emerges, recognizable in countless novels of courtship and marriage from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and beyond. At this point, friendship itself becomes feminized, in contrast to the long-standing emphasis on masculine friendship from the classical through the Renaissance periods. It is the friendship of two girls embracing under the bedcovers at boarding school (Jane Eyre), of passionate letters detailing the inner workings of families and courtship (Clarissa), of one woman supporting another after romantic disappointment (Aurora Leigh). It is everywhere, and it seems to have nothing to do with the wrenching decisions about conflicting allegiances that characterize the years of the English Civil Wars and Restoration.

William Rounseville Alger's The Friendships of Women (1868) articulates a remarkably resilient account of the meanings of women's friendship. He writes,