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The Company She Keeps: an ethnography of girls' friendship
VALERIE HEY. 1997
Buckingham, Open University Press
ix + 165pp. L40.00 hardback, L12.99 paperback.
This book is one of the relatively few pieces of feminist research to have ventured into the secretive and intense world of girls' friendship groups. It is based on an ethnographic study in two mixed sex London comprehensive schools carried out by Valerie Hey during the 1980s. Ethnographic youth research has become something of a rarity as a consequence of the time-consuming (and therefore expensive) nature of this type of research, based as it is on extended periods of observation and participation. Valerie Hey acknowledges that writing this book (whilst working on 'soft' research money on unrelated topics) turned her into a 'workaholic' out of necessity, and for many feminists engaged in research work, this will not be an unfamiliar experience. In my view, her efforts have been more than worthwhile. This short but enormously rich and thoughtful book is an important text in feminist understandings (recollections?) of girls' same-sex friendships.
My hesitation over the use of the term 'recollection' above is because I do not wish to imply that all women's experiences of female friendships as girls and young women are inherently similar. Nor would girls' friendships occupy equivalent spaces in different cultural (i.e. historical and political) contexts. However, there is something significant in the tendency amongst adult women (including...