The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship

This is an Archive of a Past Event
Book Talk with Marilyn Yalom and Theresa Donovan Brown
In today’s culture, the bonds of female friendship are taken as a given, but only a few centuries ago, the idea of female friendship was completely unacknowledged, even pooh-poohed. Only men, the reasoning went, had the necessary qualities to develop and sustain such meaningful relationships. Surveying history, literature, philosophy, religion, and pop culture, Marilyn Yalom and Theresa Donovan Brown, demonstrate how women co-opted the public face of friendship. Their book, The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship, illuminates the story of women as friends throughout the ages.
About the Speakers
Author and historian, Marilyn Yalom is a senior scholar and former director at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. Yalom has an extensive list of scholarly publications on literature and women's history. Theresa Donovan Brown is an award-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction. She holds a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.