Abstract
The central theme of this book is that friendship has a public life as well as a private one, and that sometimes these two aspects of friendship are intertwined, as discussions of neighbourhood, volunteering, civil society and work showed. Traditional accounts of women’s friendships tended to locate them within the private sphere. But women’s increased participation in the public domain of work changes the focus. The public setting of work creates a new setting for exploring the patterns of women’s friendships. Friendship makes it possible to have a personal life in public. It has a key role to play in organizing privacy in our lives; and it has a capacity to form community, bringing the individual and the collective together in personal communities.
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Earlier evidence of the blending of public and private characteristics in neighbouring may be seen in the friendships that developed between women in working-class neighbourhoods, where reciprocity and disclosing intimacy blended together (Willmott 1986).
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Wilkinson, J. (2019). Conclusion. In: The Public Life of Friendship . Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03161-9_10
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