Women’s Relationships: Scripted, Policed, and Rewritten Across U.S. Cultural History

Across more than two centuries of literature, pop culture, and media, the digital timeline on this website reveals a consistent pattern: women’s relationships, whether romantic, platonic, familial, or communal, are shaped, strained, and often weaponized by patriarchal expectations. Yet, at each historical moment, women also rewrite those expectations, using irony, performance, solidarity, and storytelling to create new forms of agency. My timeline shows that female connection has always been political, always contested, and always evolving. What becomes clear when reading my timeline from early American literature to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter is that the cultural scripts governing female identity haven’t changed as much as we’d like to believe. Instead, they have been recurring in new forms.

In The Coquette (1802), Eliza Wharton is judged through a rigid moral lens, while the women around her negotiate friendship through surveillance, caution, and competition: “let sincerity and virtue…lead you to happiness” (Letter 19). Yet the timeline pairs this with modern reality TV dynamics, where contestants like Corinne Olympios echo that same competitive script: “You can’t compete where you don’t compare” she said. The parallel teaches us that women have long been encouraged to see one another as rivals rather than allies.

By 1920s–1950s popular fiction, works like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes show women navigating patriarchy through performance. Lorelei Lee might act naive, but she is not naive about her relationships; “There is nothing so wonderful as two girls when they stand up for each other” (ch. 1). Her persona becomes both mask and power. The timeline’s pairing of Lorelei with Paris Hilton reveals the long genealogy of women using caricatures strategically to survive cultures that underestimate them.

In texts by and about women of color, especially in Malaeska, Wynema, Iola Leroy, and Sui Sin Far’s “The Land of the Free”, female relationships become even more complex. Race, colonialism, and cultural displacement shape how solidarity forms and how it fractures. When Malaeska’s community condemns her; “She has disgraced her tribe” (pg. 72), it shows how social boundaries can isolate women even within their own cultures. Similarly, Lae Choo in “The Land of the Free” is denied emotional support by the very system that steals her child. These works expose how structural oppression tethers personal relationships to political realities.

The timeline’s contemporary pairings, Insecure, Yellowjackets, Barbie, and online feminism (#WomenSupportingWomen), highlight continuity rather than rupture. Issa and Molly’s friendship in Insecure mirrors the tension between ambition and loyalty found in earlier novels. Yellowjackets literalizes the idea of “trauma bonds,” echoing Lae Choo’s isolated suffering. And the critiques of Barbie or the performativity of hashtag feminism reflect the same anxieties Harper traced in Iola Leroy: that solidarity is always fragile, always under negotiation, always susceptible to social hierarchy.

Finally, Wynema’s insistence that Native people “have their own ways, their own hearts, their own sorrows” resonates with Beyoncé’s reclamation of country music in Cowboy Carter. Both texts ask who gets to speak, who gets to represent, and who gets to define culture. Their pairing underscores that female creative expression is always tied to broader political struggles over voice and identity. Taken together, the timeline teaches that female bonds, friendship, motherhood, alliance, and mentorship are shaped by social forces but not determined by them. Women have always found ways to reimagine connection, subvert expected roles, and challenge structures designed to divide them. Whether through the sentimental letters of The Coquette or the defiant artistry of Cowboy Carter, women continue to resist the narratives imposed on them and write new ones in their place.