It is 12:30 in the morning, and you're doomscrolling before bed as usual. Suddenly, she sends you a reel about friendship, and somehow it evokes the beautiful, warm feeling of your friendship. Next thing you know, you are on a one-hour call with her, talking about silly to serious things, or sending each other memes and posts that are relatable to both of you. Nothing about this is historic; it is just another day in your women's friend circle. This is what friendship looks like at close range in 2026, and even 200 years ago it looked the same but with different means and modes.Today, the third Sunday of September happens to be National Women’s Friendship Day, started by the Kappa Delta sorority in 1999 to give women one official excuse to say thank you to each other. If you are wondering how an occasion started by a sorority somehow still gets celebrated and sticks even in this busy world where people get bored at a 30-second video, you end up somewhere unexpected. You will end up at two hundred-odd years of women writing each other with whatever material happened to be available: letters, diaries, tiny photographs, scrapbooks, blogs, group chats, and Instagram grids. Same emotion, but different tools.So, let’s travel through the archives of women's friendship; not forward, but backwards from reels and memes to letters and diaries.
We might not admit it openly, but most women keep two different archives on the same friendship at once, and they seldom match. There is the Instagram version: well-lit, captioned, maybe slightly performed (not always), the version of your friendship that you would show to the public that doesn’t know much about either of you.And then there is the WhatsApp version, or the group chat: lots of typos, unfiltered, screenshot-heavy, unhinged and even deranged occasionally. That is the version only your women friends understand and probably make others puzzled.Nobody planned this split. It just happens: a public self and a private one, running in parallel, but both true.
Let’s travel to the 2000s, and there you will find the hinge of this public/private split first opened up. Imagine a diary with a comment section; that was personal blogs. And now imagine your diary giving you suggested links to other women’s diaries; that was blogrolls. It is a sidebar list of links to other women’s blogs, clicking from one to the next until, as one blogger who started hers in 2006 put it, an entire community of 'mom blogging friends' existed that hadn't existed the year before. By 2005, this had gotten big enough to need a name and a conference: BlogHer, co-founded by a former newspaper reporter who'd noticed, while working at an early women's internet portal, that the one thing women online simply would not stop doing was talk to each other (a pattern which continues).
Now, if we travel further back before the digital era, there was an era of scrapbook or keepsake books, or Victorian ‘friendship albums’. Remember those autograph books we used to have in schools? Keepsake books are descendants of a similar but much older German custom of autograph books.In the 1800s, women used to hand their book to their friends to leave something in it: a poem, a signature, a pressed flower, and sometimes even a literal lock of hair (yes, sounds extreme, but friendship bracelets and tattoos also represent the same impulse). College women of the era who didn't yet have easy access to personal photographs used keepsake books specifically to construct a record of what their daily lives with friends actually looked like, ephemera standing in for pictures that didn't exist yet.
When the women got access to photographs, they got extremely creative with them. In 1854, a French photographer patented the carte-de-visite: a photographic portrait printed small enough, almost the size of a playing card, to be cheap, mass-producible, and easy to carry. And by 1860, 'cartomania' had swept through Victorian England, and it became completely ordinary to exchange these little photo-portraits with friends on a social visit, just like we click pictures now and ask that designated photographer of our group to share them immediately.There was an even more creative way women used photographs. According to one museum study, there were ‘photocollage albums’, which Victorian women made by cutting the heads and figures out of their friends’ cartes-de-visite and pasting them into hand-painted scenes, their friends’ faces reassembled into invented settings, jokes, and social satire that has nothing to do with where the photo was taken. Yes, it was like Victorian Photoshop with scissors and a paintbrush.A woman's carte-de-visite collection, one historian points out, effectively functioned as a visual display of her entire social world; an ancient version of the current Instagram grid.
Travel back further, and the record gets more honest and quieter, because nobody was meant to see it. This is the diary, the archives which supposed to have no audience at all. However, historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who spent years reconstructing the life of an 18th-century midwife from her diary, wrote about the strange intimacy of reading one woman's daily entries without her consent (imagine somebody reading our notes in our phones, what a dreadful thought!).This is also the era the historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg examined in her landmark 1975 essay on 19th century women's friendships, which one reader later described as a portrait of how central and emotionally rich these bonds actually were. Until then, most historians had simply written past it by treating them as background noise instead of the central relationships they clearly were to the women living them.
And at the last stop of this journey, we end up finding letters and the novels that were built from them. Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra for most of her adult life: chatty, funny, occasionally gossipy letters, the kind you would send your best friend now. The digitised collection of them is now available, addressed as most were, to my dear Cassandra.When a librarian at Princeton found two previously undigitised Austen letters to Cassandra in the archives, she described the moment as her sense of wonder coming roaring back after years of professional routine, which itself is a nice proof of how alive these two-century-old friendships still feel.Austen then took that private material and transformed them into her novels and characters, Elizabeth Bennet and Charlotte Lucas, Emma and Harriet, turning private correspondence into public art. Historian Marilyn Yalom traced this whole arc in her book ‘The Social Sex’, arguing that female friendship went from something ancient philosophers barely acknowledged to something women themselves had to write into existence, because no one else was going to do it for them (we still feel that way about many things).
By the end of this travel, you might wonder why women's friendships have such an enormous paper trail, when so much about women’s lives got left out of historical records entirely?A few reasons keep surfacing. Women were mostly excluded from the official archive, such as politics, the business ledgers, and the war reports, for most of history. So, for women, the relationships around them became the history they were allowed to author. Friendship was also, for centuries, one of the only sanctioned intimacies and intellectual outlets available to a woman whose mobility and choices were otherwise tightly restricted. Thus, it got documented with the urgency of something load-bearing, because it was. And there's a plainer instinct underneath both of those: writing a friendship down was a way of proving you'd been witnessed, in a world that didn't reliably write women down at all.Even the Pew Research Center found this pattern repeating itself as recently as the early internet. Women started adopting email faster and more enthusiastically than men, specifically to deepen relationships, at rates that startled the researchers running the study.
From Jane Austen writing letters to Cassandra by candlelight, to us sending voice notes and long paragraphs to our women friends, time and modes have changed, but the instinct underneath it and the impulse haven’t. It is the same urge to share anything and everything with your girl friends, thank them, and let them know that you experience life together.Formats and modes have changed, but ultimately women's friendship and the support and emotions that come with it haven’t. So send a random voice note or a message to your women friends; let them know that you are grateful for them (or you can send this article to them).