“always there for me”: friendship patterns and expectations among middle- and working-class men...

Sociological Forum, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1995

"Always There For Me": Friendship Patterns and Expectations Among Middle- and Working-Class Men and Women 1

K a r e n W a l k e r 2

Using data from semistructured qualitative interviews with 52 working- and middle-class women and men, this paper compares differences in both friendship patterns and expectations of friendship. Working-class respondents' friendships revealed a high degree of reciprocity and interdependence with respect to material goods and services. Norms of working-class friendship emphasized being able to rely on friends for such services. Middle-class respondents, in contrast, celebrated shared leisure and the existence of large networks of interesting friends. Middle-class friendships enhanced the individuality that characterizes contemporary middle-class life. As a result of class differences in the meanings and expectations of friendship, the potential strains and conflicts differed. Working-class respondents reported far more open conflict with friends over the exchange of services than did middle-class respondents. Middle-class respondents reported difficulties in asking friends for help, even though being able to do so was a widely shared ideal of friendship.

KEY WORDS: friendship; class stratification; interpersonal relations; reciprocity; social networks.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

WHAT IS A FRIEND? Someone who's . . . always there for you . . . [to] talk to if you need someone to talk to. Favors, I have one friend--well, one basic fi'iend, and she'll do anything for me . . . You should be able to rely on that person, and know that they're not going to stab you in the back . . . no matter what you say to them, no matter what you do, they'll always be there for you.--Gloria, working-class woman

tAn earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Boston, Massachusetts, March 1993.

2Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104.

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Gosh, let's see, friendship: I guess it's made up of like, loyalty and somebody who you can share, who has similar values, similar ideas of what makes . . . what's fun, what's pleasurable, what's not. Just somebody who shares a similar philosophy. Someone who's there when you need them.--Jane, middle-class woman

For both Gloria and Jane, a friend was someone "who's there for you" or "there when you need them." Their comments were typical of the middle- and working-class women and men in this study. The words and phrases, "being there," "someone you can talk to," "trust," "loyalty," and "sharing" came up repeatedly in interviews. But as other researchers have noted (e.g., Fischer, 1982a), the meaning of the term "friend" is very am- biguous in the United States. Just what is a friend? Someone with whom you do things? Someone you trust with intimacies? Both? And who can be a friend? Can a neighbor be a friend? What about a brother? Or a college roommate one has not seen for five years but with whom one exchanges Christmas cards? And what does it mean to be friends? Do commonly used phrases describing friendship mean the same thing for people from different social classes? Does "being there" mean the same for Gloria as for Jane?

Sociologists studying friendship in a contemporary western context have typically seen it as a significant, positive relationship in people's lives. Simmel (1906) characterized friendship as an expressive relationship that involves the total personality and develops individuality. More recently, sociologists have characterized it as an emotionally supportive relationship or one that encourages personal autonomy and individuality (Gouldner and Strong, 1987; Oliker, 1989; Rawlins, 1992; Rubin, 1985; Suttles, 1968; Swain, 1989; Wellman, 1992). Friendship is frequently seen as a voluntary, affective relationship in which equality is fundamental. Giddens, for instance, states that friendship approaches a "pure relationship," in which the ties between two people are "not anchored in external conditions of social or economic life" (1991:89). For Giddens, friendship is one of the relationships in which self-identity is formed and worked on.

Network analysts (Fischer, 1982b; Wellman, 1992; Willmott, 1987) examine structural characteristics of friendship such as where people meet friends, who their friends are, and what they do with friends. They also study the kinds of social support people receive from friends as opposed to other relationships, such as kin (Fischer, 1982b; WeUman and Wortley, 1990). Noting the research problems inherent in characterizing friendship networks, Fischer (1982a) argues that one solution to reducing the ambiguity of the term "friend" is to examine whom people name as friends. In his study he requested information about respondents' social networks and

3The names of the respondents have been changed.

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the ways in which respondents were related to the people named (e.g., as friends, neighbors, relatives). Then, correlating the use of the term "friend" with other characteristics of the associates and the respondents (whether they worked together, were neighbors, etc.), he concludes that Americans use "friend" to refer to social associates who are not relatives, not neighbors, and not kin.

Still other researchers have examined the effects of gender on friendship. They have often noted that women say friends are intimates with whom they share feelings whereas men emphasize that friends are those with whom they share activities (Bell, 1981; Caldwell and Peplau, 1982; Oliker, 1989; Rubin, 1985; Swain, 1989). In earlier work, I noted that although men emphasize activity and women emphasize talk in accounts of their friendships, their friendship behaviors are more similar than different. In addition, material conditions have effects on women's and men's abilities to conform to gender ideologies of friendship: working-class men and professional women, in particular, tend to have gender discordant friendship styles. Thus, structural and interactional explanations are more ade- quate than accounts relying on differential psychic development between boys and girls for understanding gender similarities and differences (Walker, 1994).

Although gender comparisons are common in the social scientific literature on friendship, examinations of social class in adult friendship are scarce (Allan, 1989; Blieszner and Adams, 1992). Those that exist emphasize structural differences in middle- and working-class friendships, such as when, where, and how often people meet (Allan, 1989; Willmott, 1987). But qualitative differences in the meanings and the dynamics of friendship for individuals of different social classes have been neglected.

Ethnographic literature on the working class does contain accounts of working class friendships. These studies, however, often examine only men's friendships (Anderson, 1976; Halle, 1984; Kornblum, 1974; Liebow, 1967; Suttles, 1968; Whyte, 1981) or the functions of friendship for individuals' emotional well-being (Komarovsky, 1987). Some note that working-class friends perform important services for one another (Gans, 1982; Liebow, 1967; Stack, 1974), but none make the examination of friendship its primary focus. Instead, friendship is seen as a variant of a primary group relationship rather than a specific relationship to be demarcated from other relationships (Korublum, 1974).

In this paper, I compare friendship patterns (such as how often friends see one another and what they do together) as well as expectations about friendship for working- and middle-class respondents. Comparative sociology has not been applied systematically to research on friendship and class.

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The empirical data presented here suggest that claims that friendship is an important milieu for the development of individuality and a relationship unconnected to economics must be tempered. I show that activities individuals share with friends and the norms they have for friendship are closely related to material conditions. In addition, I argue that part of the ambiguity in everyday uses of the terms "friend" and "friendship" that social scientists have observed results in part from group differences in the meanings of friendships. One way to reduce the ambiguity is to examine those differences, as I do here.

There is a long sociological tradition of describing and explaining the cultural differences between classes (and the segments within them; e.g., Gans, 1982; Komarovsky, 1987; Rubin, 1976). Many studies examine groups' and individuals' responses to material constraints and argue that structural conditions lead to specific cultural responses. It is primarily the interplay between material conditions and respondents' cultural notions of friendship that motivate this paper. I describe how the social and material organization of working- and middle-class respondents' lives leads to different class-based norms for, and meanings of, friendship. These norms are important in guiding respondents' behavior and helping them interpret events in their friendships.

METHOD OF STUDY

Data for this project were gathered between February 1991 and Sep- tember 1992 for a study of friendship, class, and gender. I conducted in- depth interviews with 52 mostly white working- and middle-class men and women between the ages of 24 and 48 living in and around Philadelphia. I interviewed 9 working- and 10 middle-class men, and 15 middle- and 18 working-class women. Thinking that differences in parenthood status and labor force participation might affect the activities and origins of women's friendships, as well as the time available for friends, I interviewed both working women and those who stayed home with children. Hence, there are more women than men in the sample.

For the purposes of this analysis I placed respondents in the working- or middle-class groups primarily on the basis of education and occupation. While particular variables are sometimes used as accurate proxies for de- termining class in the United States, no single variable determines class for all individuals. For example, the class of women who are not employed in the labor market may not be objectively determined by occupational characteristics, which others have used as the measure of class (Wright, 1985).


Therefore, it frequently makes more sense to determine class by looking at patterns of several variables. 4

Working-class respondents generally had high school educations or less. A third, however, had one or two years of college, usually acquired at local community colleges. Eight working-class women worked as low-level service workers, for example, cashiers, or clerical workers. Four of those women worked part time, and their work histories were characterized by less conti- nuity than middle-class women's. Men worked in traditional male craft jobs, such as tile setting, or service work, such as bank telling. Most working-class respondents lived in densely populated urban neighborhoods in Philadelphia, 3 women and 1 man, however, lived in working-class suburbs.

The middle-class respondents differed from the working-class men and women in a number of ways. All had four year college degrees, and most had graduate degrees in the professions; over two-thirds worked as professionals, for example, lawyers, academics, or physicians. Middle-class women who were at home caring for small children at the time of the interview had past work experiences in administration or management. The middle-class respondents lived in urban apartments with center city ad- dresses if they were unmarried or had no children. If married and/or with children, they tended to live in single suburban homes.

These two groups of respondents were not representative of the working or middle classes as a whole. The middle-class men and women came primarily from the urban professional segment of the middle class. They were highly mobile, highly educated, and often worked long hours. The working-class respondents lived in stable and cohesive working-class urban neighborhoods. Because other segments of the middle and working classes have somewhat different lifestyles and expectations, the results reported here are limited in their generalizability. Nevertheless, they are suggestive of the influences that material conditions of class exert on notions of friendship.

To select respondents, I requested working- and middle-class men and women with whom I had contacts to refer me to people they knew but with whom they were not close friends. After having interviewed the first referrals, I asked them for referrals to 1 or more close friends, preferably friends who knew one another. All but 5 respondents, therefore, had at least 1 friend in the study. Several had 2 friends, and 3 working-class women each had 3 friends in the study. Those who did not have friends in the

41 did not use income to determine class. Although middle-class respondents usually had higher incomes, some overlap in family income levels occurred between the groups in the $40,00-$60,000 range. As Halle (1984) and Sennett and Cobb (1972) have noted, some blue-collar wages bring families middle-class incomes, although the continuing loss of high-wage blue-collar jobs makes this decreasingly likely.

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study either refused to refer their friends to me or, in one case, had a friend who refused to be interviewed.

My approach led to considerable ethnic and marital diversity because I asked respondents to refer me to their most intimate local friends and did not place any other limitations on their referrals. All respondents but one were white; the working-class sample included one African American woman who was friends with 3 white respondents. In general, however, respondents reported few interracial friendships, which is not surprising since Americans tend to have racially homogeneous networks (Marsden, 1987a, 1987b). Among both the middle- and working-class sample were Irish or Italian Americans. Several middle-class men and women were Jewish, but only one working-class woman was. One middle-class man was Palestinian American, and a working-class woman was Puerto Rican. The remainder of the respondents were of Northern European descent.

Most respondents were married, and many had children. Over three- quarters of the men and two-thirds of the women were married. There were more single professional women (about 40%) than single working- class women or men of either class. While about three-quarters of the working-class respondents had children, less than half of the middle-class men and women did. These differences reflect the fact that working-class men and women married and bore children in their late teens or early twenties, while the middle-class respondents deferred marriage and childbearing to their late twenties and early thirties.

The method by which I selected respondents is unusual and has both drawbacks and advantages. Chief among the disadvantages are the possi- bility of bias and the limits of generalizability. However, the fit of what I have discovered with previous ethnographies and network studies that have considered friendship suggests that my respondents are not atypical.

Despite the method's disadvantages, there are several significant advantages. Qualitative sociologists with small samples generally attempt either to maximize the social distance between respondents if they use snowball samples (e.g., Rubin, 1976) or they use ethnographic methods in particular groups. Neither of these approaches would have allowed me to answer the kinds of questions that interested me. Careful comparisons are badly needed in friendship studies, and interviewing men and women from the working and middle classes allows for comparisons that are unavailable in ethnographic studies of single groups. Furthermore, as a woman I could not do ethnographic research among a group of working-class men friends. Nor, as Stacey Oliker has noted (1989), can a researcher do ethnography of friendship dyads. Finally, I gained a fuller understanding of the meanings of friendship interactions by interviewing friends. Descriptions of friendship


were enriched by having several accounts of relationships from different respondents.

Individual semistructured interviews lasted anywhere from 35 minutes (for one woman who claimed only one friend and had little to say about friendship) to 41/2 hours (for a few women and men in their forties who had particularly long and complex friendship histories). In general, however, I spent an 11/2 to 2 hours with most people. I began the interviews by asking respondents to speak generally about how they defined friendship and what their friendships were like. Although Adams (1989) notes that global questions are unreliable for gathering information about actual friendship behaviors, I found them particularly useful in getting respondents to talk about their cultural ideologies of friendship. I then asked respondents for an adult friendship history. This was most conveniently gathered by asking people about major life events (e.g., college, work, marriage, children) and then asking them to talk about their friends during particular periods. For current friends I asked where and when they met them, how often they interacted, when they had last talked to each friend, what they had talked about, and what activities they did together. I also asked them to tell me about the nature of their friendships with those people. For past friends, I asked many of the same questions, as well as why the friendships ended.

Although I did not restrict my study to same-gender friends, the re- suits reported here are based on those friendships, which constituted a very large proportion of all respondents' friendships. Respondents had considerable freedom to choose whom to include in their lists of friends. If individuals claimed large groups of friends during a particular period of their lives (more than 20 or so), I asked them to list the friends with whom they were "relatively" close. If they could not remember the name or any individual characteristics of the friends, I noted their existence but could not inquire much further about them.

FINDINGS

Definitions of Friendship

Examining the ways that social scientists have defined "friend" in their studies, Adams (1989) notes that some researchers' a priori definitions of friendship may exclude people whom respondents consider friends. In the current study, respondents were asked to define friendship. Their responses indicated the existence of two major dimensions of friendship. First is a structural aspect of friendship. Most respondents distinguished "friend"

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from "relative" or "co-worker." This did not mean, however, that a relative could not be a friend. Instead, it meant that respondents often contradicted themselves within the interviews or felt the need to justify why they considered kin or co-workers their friends.

The second dimension of friendship, affect, was relatively more important to the way people thought about friendship. The vast majority of respondents believed that friends were people with whom one could talk and share activities, and those for whom one had warm feelings. Because this affective dimension of friendship was so important, kin, co-workers, and neighbors frequently qualified as friends.

About four-fifths of the working-class respondents named kin other than spouses as friends. In contrast, less than half the middle-class men and women did so (although they listed more spousal friendships, a special form of friendship discussed below). Working-class men and women were more likely to list kin as friends because they were not as geographically mobile as the middle-class respondents. As they reached adulthood, working-class men and women reported that they sometimes developed friendships with relatives with whom they were in frequent contact, and of the 55 kin they named as friends (excluding spouses), 51 lived locally. Over three-quarters of middle-class respondents, in contrast, lived far from their families and relatives, and had few opportunities to become friends with relatives other than spouses. When they did live near kin, middle-class respondents developed friendships with them, which also suggests that proximity enabled the formation of kin friendships. Of the 38 kin friends (excluding spouses) named, 16 lived within an hour's drive of the respondents. Another 10 had done so at some point in the respondents' adult lives.

Spousal friendship is distinct from other kin friendships because the notion of friendship within marriage has considerable cultural support (Shorter, 1975). In the past, researchers have noted that the ideal of com- panionate marriage took hold in the middle class earlier than in the working class and ascribed the difference to cultural lag (Komarovsky, 1987; Rubin, 1976). In this study, less than one-third of the married working-class respondents listed their spouses as friends whereas over half of the mid- die-class respondents did. The reasons for the difference are complex. First, the lives of the working-class respondents were highly gender segregated. In some families, working-class men worked night shifts or side jobs with male friends. Their wives spent their days and evenings in the company of other women. In other families, women worked at night so they could be home with children during the day and husbands cared for the children at night.


Second, financial strains or problems such as substance abuse, occurred more frequently among married working-class respondents, pre- eluded the development of spousal friendships. One working-class mother talked to friends about her lack of friendship with her husband. She reported a conversation with a friend:

I was saying that . . . because of the background me and my husband had together we didn't really have a good friendship. I would want more of a friendship.

Drug use presented difficulties in the early years of this marriage. The wife reported that her husband kept busy to avoid situations where he might use drugs, and so he was frequently gone from home. In addition, she said she did not trust him much. She expressed, but could not achieve, the ideal of friendship within marriage.

Finally, most of the working-class men and over half of the working- class women placed high value on same-gender socializing. The vast majority of women and men reported having regular nights out "with the guys" or "with the girls" from which they explicitly excluded spouses. In contrast, only 4 middle-class respondents said that they had sometimes had "guys" (or "girls' ") night out." In general, working-class respondents lacked the opportunities to develop spousal friendships even though some expressed the ideal.

Not only did more working-class respondents list kin (excluding spouses) as friends, they also excluded from their lists of friends nonkin associates with whom they socialized. The density of neighborhood networks meant that working-class people sometimes socialized with people they did not much like. In one dramatic example, Cecilia, a working-class woman, socialized two or three times a week with Elaine, both one-on-one and in a group. But, having talked about her as a friend early in the interview, she later excluded her name on a list of friends:

ls Elaine your friend as well? Elaine is in the clique, Elaine is very good friends with Kathy and Janet. I respect Elaine, she's an associate. She's not a friend of mine . . . . Why is she an associate and not a fn'end? Well, because of things that have happened and things that have been said. Urn, for instance, I happened to be walking down the street one day and I was coming from getting a sandwich from the store and Elaine lives on that street . . . . So I'm walking down, and this little girl said, "We don't like Black people, do we." And I turned around, it really struck my heart, and I said, "Oh, honey," I said, "That's not nice, that's really not nice." And I just kept walking. But the kids hear that at home, they don't pick that up in the street.

The little girl was Elaine's daughter. Since Cecilia believed that children pick up prejudice at home, she did not consider Elaine her friend. In this and other cases, the structural and the affective dimensions of friendship worked in opposite directions as people talked about who their friends were. Rather than attempting to do away with this tension, it is useful to

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recognize that they exist because the idea of friendship is so complex. But the affective dimension of friendship tended to dominate in the way all but one respondent talked about friendship.

Patterns of Friendship

Geographic mobility, work, and family commitments organized working- and middle-class respondents' lives differently; thus their friendships generally differed in such fundamental ways as how many friends they had, how often they saw them, and what they did with them. The size of individuals' networks varies (Blieszner and Adams, 1993; Fischer, 1982b, Well- man, 1988). In general, however, working- and middle-class respondents listed about the same number of local friends. Middle-class respondents averaged 9 local friends and working-class respondents averaged 10.5; the median for both groups was 8. There was, however, a large difference in the number of long distance friends the two groups listed. Over half the middle-class men and women listed as many or more long distance friends as current local friends, and the average was almost 9 long distance friends. Even those respondents who had not themselves been very mobile had geographically mobile friends with whom they kept in contact. In contrast, the working-class men and women had few long distance friends. All but 5 listed no more than 2 friends who lived farther than an hour's drive away. Additionally, those long distance friends they did list tended to live within a two-hour drive of the city, whereas the middle-class men's and women's long distance friends stretched across the country and, in some cases, the world. These findings are roughly consonant with Fischer's observations that affluent respondents' networks were more dispersed and larger than those of nonaffluent people (1982b).

The Structure of Working-Class Respondents' Friendships

Although the numbers of local friendships were similar for both working- and middle-class men and women, working-class respondents saw their friends more frequently than the middle-class men and women. Men and women often saw friends one or more times a week. Over half the working-class men met informally in public spaces such as bars or local play- grounds. The rest dropped by their friends' homes for informal visits. During their visits in bars or homes they talked about their everyday work and family activities. They also arranged future social occasions as well as side jobs, which 7 of the 9 working-class men did at least occasionally.


Replicating previous research findings that women see their friends more frequently at home than men do (Allan, 1989; Willmott, 1987), women in this study dropped in on one another during the day if they were not employed in the labor market, and on the weekends and occasionally in the evenings if they were. For about two-thirds of the working-class women there were seasonal differences in the frequency of seeing friends. Women saw their friends more often in warm months than in the winter. During nice weather, women said they socialized on stoops or took their children to local parks together. They sometimes saw their friends as often as three to five times a week. In contrast, during the winter months women reported seeing their closest friends once or twice a week. Whether working-class women worked in the labor force affected how often they saw their friends. Employed women saw their friends only once or twice a week, instead of three or more times a week.

Working-class men and women most often reported that they hung out with friends either at home or in public spaces. Occasionally they reported going out to dinner. More rarely, they reported having parties in their homes. A few men and women engaged in local sports activities, and working-class men did casual work with friends.

The Structure of Middle-Class Respondents' Friendships

In striking contrast to working-class patterns, middle-class women and men tended to see local friends bimonthly at the most, and frequently much less often than that. In part, this had to do with where they met friends. Middle-class men and women often met friends at college, graduate school, work, or through their extracurricular activities. Neighbors were a much smaller proportion of middle-class respondents' friends than they were for working-class respondents. As a result, middle-class friends rarely reported running into friends on the street.

Middle-class respondents also did different things with their friends than the working-class respondents. While some professionals occasionally met friends at bars after work, this was unusual and seemed to depend on having a group of people who all had free time available. Middle-class men and women frequently saw friends at dinners in their homes or they went out to dinner or lunch. Occasionally, they saw friends at events such as concerts and professional sporting events. Musicians and singers met at choirs or musical groups and socialized with friends after practice. Like working-class respondents, middle-class individuals reported rarely having parties. For both the middle- and the working-class respondents, ritual events such as weddings were important times for friendship sociability. In

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addition, for the middle class, college reunions were often important places to meet old friends.

Seasonal differences among the middle-class respondents differed from those in the working-class. While the working-class respondents tended to be much more involved with neighborhood friends during the summer, middle-class respondents visited, or were visited by, long distance friends more often in the summer. Their patterns conform to Michelson's (1971) observations that the summer is a time when middle-class women increase their contacts outside their immediate community relative to those inside their community. This was also true for men in this study.

Class differences in the frequency of meeting were due to several causes: geographic closeness, time available for socializing, and multiple ties. Working-class respondents' friendships often originated in their neighborhoods so they were likely to see friends in public spaces or drop by each other's homes. The informality of meeting arrangements created a high proportion of a type of friendship that Allan (1989) has called "mateship," that is, social relations whose maintenance depends on their social context (e.g., bar, neighborhood street, or playground). This pattern of sociality had implications for people's abilities to maintain and form friendships. First, when friends moved, working-class men and women rarely stayed in contact with them. Their friendships lacked patterns of communication that enabled them to maintain contact. Financial resources limited their incentives to create new patterns of communication with those who moved away. As one woman said, "they're like long distance phone calls, and I really can't talk to them long on the phone to say like, 'Oh, I'm having a problem with this and that. '"

The second implication of these friendship patterns is that when working-class people move from their neighborhoods they may have longer periods of isolation and loneliness after they move than middle-class people. In their study of East London, Young and Willmott (1992) observed that, after moving to the working-class suburb of Greenleigh, their respondents thought their new neighborhood was not as friendly as the old one. While about three-quarters of my working-class respondents lived in the neighborhoods in which they were raised, several had moved. Those respondents talked about the process of making new friends in new neighborhoods. The woman who was most successful in doing so was unusually gregarious. The others talked about the isolation they felt.

In contrast, middle-class respondents were more successful in main- taining long distance friendships. About half the middle-class women reported that they wrote letters to their long distance friends. Men and all other women telephoned long distance friends at least occasionally. They also visited them or went on infrequent trips with them. It was not uncom-


mon for individuals to go for six months or a year without any communication with long distance friends. Rubin (1985) has noted that men report having friendships with other men with whom they rarely speak. She doubts whether these people are actually friends. In my study, both men and women reported friendships with minimal interaction. Among my middle- class respondents, however, infrequently contacted friends were undoubt- edly important to the emotional terrain of respondents. Friends in other places were important to aspects of respondents' identities. Long distance friends enriched their sense of who they were and where they had come from. Furthermore, respondents usually had some reason for believing that such friendships could be activated. They had activated them in the past. Other friends had initiated contact with them or there were continuing, if infrequent, statements on both sides that the friendship was important. Their emotional importance to individuals was significant, but concrete manifestations of friendship were often absent.

A third implication of class-differentiated friendship patterns is that multiple ties, frequent interaction, and high network density among working-class respondents led to a concern about reputation within friendship groups not evident among middle-class friends. Working-class respondents told stories of friendships breaking up because men and women had heard through others that friends had "bad-mouthed" them to others. 5 It was because of the danger of negative local talk that respondents emphasized the importance of confidentiality and trust in friendship. Middle-class respondents, in contrast, often had friends who did not know one another. The risk of having negative comments get back to friends was low, and I did not hear similar stories about friends who had talked about them behind their backs. The circumstances in which middle-class friends regularly talked about other friends was in playing "catch up" with long-distance, rarely contacted friends. This kind of talk did not lead to open conflict and hostility.

Material Interdependence Among Working-Class Friends

Not only were there differences in terms of how many friends people had, but friendship also functioned differently for middle- and working-class respondents. One function of working-class friendships was to provide friends with needed goods and services. Working-class respondents provided services for one another that they could not have afforded had their friends been unwilling to exchange services. This instrumentalism was pos-

SSuttles (1968) noted a similar phenomenon in his Chicago community study.

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sible in the context of friendship, which was widely assumed by all respondents to be a voluntary and affective relationship, for several reasons. First, friends saw each other so often that material exchange constituted a minority of friendship interactions. Second, exchanges were seen as voluntary acts which defined friendship. Over half the working-class men and women said that a friend was someone who was "there for you" when you needed a favor. Thus, material exchange was not simply instrumental--it was also expressive of the friendship bond.

The most obvious manifestation of material exchange in friendship was in working-class respondents' homes. All 5 of the working-class men who owned their homes received help from friends on household projects. One working-class man, Jimmy, had a new kitchen with oak cabinets, re- cessed lighting, new flooring, a ceiling fan, and matching wallpaper, coun- tertops, and curtains. He and his friend Danny installed it. Danny, in turn, was renovating his living and dining rooms with the help of friends. Among these men a dense network existed through which flowed frequent exchange of services and goods. During the interview with Jimmy, Danny knocked on the door and asked to borrow a tool for a job he was doing at someone else's house.

Other forms of material exchange included the borrowing or lending of small amounts of money from friends. Working-class women also de- pended on each other for child care. While employed women generally used paid forms of care or relatives while they worked, the vast majority of working-class women reported that nonkin friends stepped in to care for children if they had doctors' appointments or their regular child care was unavailable. Working-class men and women also reported that they relied on friends for information about paid employment. They called unem- ployed friends when they heard about jobs. Several men reported finding work through friends or helping friends get jobs at their workplaces. Finally, there were miscellaneous kinds of help. Women who had cars drove friends who did not on errands or to doctors' appointments. Friends stayed with one another when they needed housing.

These behavioral patterns gave meaning to, and were the source of, respondents' claims that friends are people who will do anything for you. Without these sources of support, the lives of working-class respondents would have been harder. In response to their needs for these exchanges, men and women in this study incorporated a notion of material reciprocity into the popularly held idea that "friends are there for you and will do anything for you."

Because expectations of reciprocity were incorporated into notions of friendship, the failure to reciprocate represented both literal impoverish- ment and a breakdown in friendship. Mauss (1967) noted that the apparent


spontanei ty o f gifts somet imes obscures the obligations created by their giving, and he emphas ized the impor tance o f gifts in the creat ion o f social solidarity. In the current study, a good friend unders tood that gifts o f services m e a n t later reciprocity, but norms of giving in friendship obscured the expectat ion o f reciprocity, and no t all friends re turned favors. The negative side to this in te rdependence , then, was heightened conflict be tween friends, betrayal of expectat ions when friends did not reciprocate, and resen tment when asked to do too much for friends. While Wellman (1988) has no ted that reciproci ty a m o n g friends and o ther ne twork members is of ten somewhat asymmetrical , respondents expected some return on favors, e i ther directly or, in the case of dense networks, th rough the group. Resen tmen t and anger flared up when friends did not share assumptions about the exchange of services. George , for instance, had a friend do some electrical wiring:

Ah, he volunteered to do some electrical downstairs. I volunteered to pay him. "I don't want you to do it for nothing." "Oh, OK, I appreciate that." I didn't expect a bill. I mean, I was going to pay him. And uh, for the price that I paid for that I probably could have got a regular contractor to do it. The agreement that I thought we had was that I would pay him so much a day, all right? And I kept track, I've got it written down, I kept track of how many hours he put in. And at the end, when he got done, I said, "Listen, how much do you want an hour?" He said, "Oh, don't worry about it. I'll work it up." Well, I got a bill, like, I mean, a regular bill, you know.

ThOUgh George believed he could not openly confront his friend over the bill, he was disturbed. He no longer considered this man a close friend. An tagon i sms such as this were possible when friends provided highly priced services at which they earned their living in the outside market . Respon- dents normal ly expected a break f rom friends on the price of services.

In terviews with working-class r e sponden t s were liberally sprinkled with accounts o f similar conflicts. Gloria repor ted that she and Lor ra ine agreed to have Thanksgiving dinner together and to split the cost of the food:

It was the day before Thanksgiving and we spent the night at her house, and we decided to, you know, have dinner together, and we both chipped in money for it and then, which we gave some, we didn't have it all on us at the time, Tom wasn't working, something like that. And so, the day of Thanksgiving, it was a month after she had her baby, she started hemorrhaging, she had to go to the hospital, it was really bad. So I stayed and I took care of her kids while she was in the hospital. Urn, at that time she was . . .into drugs . . .really bad and since we never gave her that money she argued about it, which I didn't really think she had to ask me for. I spent the whole day there and took care of her kids, you know, fed them dinner and finished Thanksgiving dinner and everything. And we argued about that and she stopped talking to me, and then she turned to God, became a born again Christian, and that's when she realized that what was going on was stupid, and we became friends. We never stopped being friends, we just stopped talking for a while.

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Tom and Gloria were financially needy; Lorraine needed someone to watch her children when she was hospitalized. Gloria believed that the help she gave Lorraine should be reciprocated by forgiving the debt for the food. But Lorraine did not agree, which caused a temporary rupture in the friendship, a rupture that was only repaired when Lorraine "realized that what was going on was stupid."

Another working-class woman, Susan, resented Lisa and Beth for what she saw as their taking advantage of her. Susan routinely drove Lisa and Beth, who did not drive, to appointments and on errands.

These are just a few examples of the kinds of conflicts that may emerge when the exchange of material services is fundamental to friendships. Respondents handled these conflicts and resentments in several ways. George redefined his relationship to the man who had done electrical work for him while he harshly teased another who had failed to return the favor of service but with whom he maintained a friendship. As Halle (1984) argues in his work on chemical workers, such harsh teasing represents working-class men's reaffirmation of values of reciprocity and friendship and tells others they violated those values. Susan used emotional withdrawal from Lisa and Beth to communicate her resentment (an emotional withdrawal her friends interpreted as indicating deeper emotional trouble; they continually urged her to be more open). Other people chose to say nothing about their resentments, believing that saying something would stir up un- necessary conflict, but their resentments simmered.

Independence and Shared Leisure Among Middle-Class Friends

Like working-class respondents, middle-class men and women said that friends were people who "were there for you." But the meaning behind the phrase differed. Middle-class respondents meant that friends would provide substantial emotional and intellectual support ff needed, whereas working-class respondents meant friends would not only provide emotional support but also routine material support. In general, middle-class friendships were marked by a much higher degree of material independence from friends. These men and women had the economic resources to pay for services, and most of their friends were not skilled in blue-collar crafts.

Friendship for middle-class men and women meant shared leisure. Men and women reported going on vacations, to concerts, out to dinner, to museums, to professional sporting events, and on ski trips much more often than the working-class respondents did. Shared leisure acted as the accumulation and display of cultural capital, as well as an important mode of self-expression. Thus, it helped to reaffirm the respondents' location in


the middle-class. Because shared leisure and personal self-development was so important for the middle-class respondents, they used terms to describe how interesting their friends were (as opposed to the working-class men and women who reported feelings of love and affection for their friends but who almost never talked about how interesting they found their friends). For instance, one professional woman said,

I have a lot of friends who are spread out all over the country and all over the world, and there are people who at different times of my life grew close, physically close, and we were very important to each other, and I know that they're incredibly special and so we keep in touch through writing or talking, but it's always a little sad because they're far away and so I don't have as much contact as I would like, and then when we are in touch I realize once again how wonderful they are.

This woman repeatedly used words such as " w a r m . . . . wonderful .... intelli- gent .... interesting" and "special" to describe her friends.

Unlike the working-class respondents, almost no middle-class respondents emphasized the importance of material exchanges in their friendships either in their definition of friendship or in their discussions of specific friends. Only a small minority, whom I discuss below, engaged in rout ine

material exchange. The class difference is most likely related to two factors. First, geographic dispersion of friends probably limited the exchange of services among the middle class. Wellman and Wortley (1990) have noted that friends who live in close proximity to one another are more likely to exchange small services than those who do not. The local friends of middle-class respondents were more geographically dispersed than those of working-class respondents. Instead of being confined to the neighborhood, as were the vast majority of the friends of the working-class respondents, they were spread out over the city and local suburbs, making it unlikely that friends would rely on one another for small services. Second, exchanging services was relatively more important to the financial well-being of the working class than it was to the middle class, who tended to have limited time to do such things.

There were two major exceptions to the pattern of restricted exchange among the middle class. First, of the 4 women who stayed at home caring for very young children, 3 reported that they occasionally shared child care with friends. In agreement with Wellman's (1985) observation that women who stay at home caring for children often have locally based networks of exchange, these women often made local friends with whom they were in frequent contact (once a week or so). This help appeared to diminish with time. Women with older children had gone back into the labor force and reported no such exchanges.

Second, professionals provided collegial help to friends. Several lawyers occasionally called one another on the phone for advice when they

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had cases touching on friends' areas of expertise. A couple of middle-class men reported that they had accompanied friends through several job changes, suggesting that there were at least exchanges of information about the availability of jobs and at most that friends had directly helped them get jobs through recommendations. However, even when services were ex- changed, the acknowledgment of this help differed for middle-class respondents. In professional life, norms dictate that merit, not personal ties, is the basis for getting hired. My professional respondents said they went to work where their friends worked, but they did not emphasize their friends' help in getting those jobs.

Despite a lack of routinized material exchanges, middle-class men and women occasionally reported receiving help from friends in extraordinary circumstances. John told me how grateful he and his wife were to a friend who came over and stayed with their daughter while they went to a hospital to see John's father-in-law who had become seriously ill:

A week night, a week night. He came over and fell asleep on our couch while we ran out to Bristol. A n d I came back about three or four o'clock in the morning . • . .And I just r emember that that cemented it for me. And it wasn ' t so much that I was waiting for this kind of confirming event as uh, I r emembered that we could have asked that of him, that we felt we could and we did . . . and that he came, no question.

John emphasized his friend's unselfishness: "he's generous, unselfish, a loyal and faithful friend."

Georgia, a professional woman, told me how a cousin with whom she was good friends came down from New York City to help prepare her son's clothes for boarding school:

A n d she came down and sewed name tags on my son's clothes when I couldn ' t face it when he was leaving home. She was one of the ones who came and let me sit there and cry while she did the work that I wasn ' t able to. Was very supportive.

These examples of unusual forms of help occurred among both the working and the middle-class respondents, and they cemented friendships. Their meaning differed across class, however. For John and Georgia these events were extremely significant and unusual. Friends who did special things became special friends. Among working-class friends such events lacked an extraordinary flavor: they are hardly more than what friends ought to do for one another. In contrast, because middle-class respondents did not expect routine material services from friends, they showed tremendous grati- tude when friends offered them.

Besides emphasizing the extraordinary nature of friends' material help, a small minority of middle-class respondents said they had trouble asking for help or resented being asked for help. Because friendship lacked

" A l w a y s T h e r e f o r M e " 2 9 1

a no t i on of m a t e r i a l he lp a m o n g mos t middle -c lass r e sponden t s , r eques t s for he lp were s o m e t i m e s seen as inappropr ia t e •

J a c o b and Mel issa , for instance, l ived in the suburbs and were g o o d f r iends wi th a n o t h e r coup le whose child a t t e n d e d an u rban child care cen-

ter. O n e day the wife of the coup le ca l led to ask Mel issa to visit the day care cen te r :

There was a crazy episode last week--they don't demand much, it's not as if it's a demanding friendship, but they were having some special day at [their son] Jay's nursery school where you're supposed to bring in a friend or a godparent or I don't know what, an uncle. Anything. Your garbage man. And she wanted Melissa to do this, on short notice she wanted her, since she now knows that Melissa drives, uh, she wanted Melissa to drive down with our son to the city and go to the school for an hour to be the special person for the morning. And it was just a ridiculous request to make of anybody who's had their driver's license for four weeks, to drive into the city with a toddler, find your way to this crazy building, when she knows that, you know, just because Melissa's home doesn't mean she doesn't have any work. You know, we're both busy and we just sort of said, "Forget it, it's crazy". • . . We just said no, and she'll just find some other sucker to do it.

Th is r eques t , which a n o t h e r pe r son might have i n t e r p r e t e d as an h o n o r and a sign o f f r iendship , was seen as "crazy" by Jacob and Melissa . T h e y

had two m a j o r r easons for tu rn ing h e r down: first, Mel issa had only been dr iv ing for a shor t p e r i o d and was no t c o m f o r t a b l e dr iv ing downtown; second, Mel i ssa had things to do. Bo th are u n d e r s t a n d a b l e reasons for re fus ing the f r iend . T h e t one of J acob ' s desc r ip t ion and his ou t rage at his f r i end ' s r eques t ind ica te his u n d e r s t a n d i n g tha t the f r iend is no t ac t ing wi thin the n o r m s o f f r iendship .

D e b o r a h , a midd le -c lass woman , d iscussed a f r i end ' s i n a p p r o p r i a t e re- ques ts for help:

Ilana occasionally asks me to do something that's kind of, you know, it is an imposition, but I do it. Actually, Jackie and Liz have called me on this a lot, like, "I can't believe you did that. I can't believe she asked you to do that." But um, I picked her up at the airport or train station a couple of times, and sometimes it hasn't been like in a moment of crisis or something like that. She'll have a sudden need to see someone she knows, and I guess I understand that, and I accommodate that. But there are sort of like neurotic needs that she has that I also just do.

L ike J a c o b ' s c o m m e n t abou t a r eques t be ing "crazy," D e b o r a h said I l ana had " n e u r o t i c needs . " D e b o r a h f i l led those needs , bu t she saw t h e m as i n a p p r o p r i a t e and h e r f r iends s u p p o r t e d this v iew with the i r comment s .

T h e flip s ide o f J acob ' s and D e b o r a h ' s c o m m e n t s a b o u t be ing asked to do i n a p p r o p r i a t e things was M a r g a r e t ' s obvious d is t ress a t no t having anyone to ask:

I care about these people, but I almost feel like they don't really want to take care of me, they don't really want to help me. I can't really ask them for something. I'm going on vacation on Saturday, I'll be back in a week, and now that I live alone it's like, "Who's going to take me to the airport?" It's not such a fucking big deal.

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I 'm sure that there are ten people I could ask, but it's like, "Well, who do I ask? Who wouldn't be busy? Who wouldn't I be putting out?" It makes me sick that I have to worry so much about it because I feel like I'm a good friend. I help other people and there are probably a dozen people who would be happy to take me to the airport.

Unlike working-class people who assume they can ask their friends for favors and that their friends will then hold them responsible for future "pay backs," Margaret had tremendous difficulty in asking for help.

Examples of requests for help and the tensions around them were rare in the talk about friendship among middle-class respondents, but they highlighted the problematic nature of exchanging material services in mid- die-class friendships that emphasize shared leisure and emotional and in- tel lectual support. Middle-class friendships among working adults contribute to the construction of individuality and independence. Instru- mentalism in what was seen as an expressive relationship was problematic.

Besides lacking a mode of material support that is so helpful, if so conflicted, among the working-class respondents, middle-class friends reported having fewer resentments and open conflicts with friends. Middle- class friends did not rely on one another for badly needed services and were therefore unlikely to be disappointed if friends failed to reciprocate in doing things. Middle-class friends also had fewer multistranded friendships embedded in their family, neighborhood, and work lives. If tension developed in middle-class friendships it was relatively easy for respondents to "drift away" from friends. The geographic proximity of working-class friends and the fact that friends frequently had so many activities together made putting emotional and social distance in their relationships difficult.

CONCLUSION

In her study of a New Jersey suburb, Baumgartner (1988) observed that working-class suburbanites were more likely to engage in open conflict than middle-class suburbanites. She ascribed this difference to the mor- phology of suburban life; working-class respondents lived in densely populated areas and were less likely to avoid one another successfully. I also observed greater conflict among my working-class respondents and a greater tendency toward "moral avoidance" (Baumgartner, 1988) among the middle-class respondents. But working-class conflict was due more broadly to the material conditions and cultural expectations of friendship instead of only morphological considerations of suburban space. Not only did working-class respondents tend to live in more highly populated neighborhoods, but they also tended to have denser networks, greater material


expectations of friendship, and be less mobile than the middle-class men and women.

I do not wish to overemphasize the differences between people of different classes. Middle- and working-class respondents shared some similar cultural values about friendship, and there were some similarities in friendship patterns. First, while interdependence was important among the working-class respondents, it occurred within the context of sociability and shared leisure, not instead of sociability. Although working-class respondents often had fewer financial resources to engage in the kinds of activities the middle-class men and women did, they did devote much time to hanging out together. Companionship was a defining element of friendship for both groups.

Second, shared emotional support was important for both working- and middle-class friends. It was enacted in slightly different ways for men and women. Men reported using humor as a vehicle for managing intimate interactions (Walker, 1994), whereas women did not. Nonetheless, almost all respondents discussed specific instances in which they relied on friends for emotional support.

Third, middle-class women who stayed home with small children often had some friendship patterns similar to working-class women at home with children. Both groups of women tended to exchange child care see their friends frequently. But, while the working-class women who worked tended to have friendships like their non-working counterparts, the middle-class working women did not.

Despite the similarities, differences in the way friendships function for middle-class and working-class respondents led to somewhat different conceptions of friendship. For the working-class men and women, material reciprocity figured prominently in discussions about what a friend was whereas middle-class men and women emphasized shared leisure. In addition, working-class men and women frequently were unsure if they should include those who had moved away as friends. They tended to focus on the importance of face-to-face interaction in friendship. Middle-class respondents, in contrast, believed that people who moved away and whom they rarely, if ever, saw could remain friends.

Working-class men's and women's friendships revealed a high degree of reciprocity and interdependence with respect to material goods and services. Reciprocity and depending on friends for material exchanges was cen- tral to the way working-class people idealized their friendships. Although such reciprocity was normative, it was also voluntary and thus conflict erupted when friends failed to reciprocate. Middle-class men and women, in contrast, celebrated leisure shared with friends and the existence of large networks of interesting friends. They rarely asked for or expected material

294 Walker

help. In friendship, then, being middle-class enhanced the individuality that characterizes middle-class contemporary life. Norms of middle-class friendship dictated against instrumental reciprocity.

One of the most important findings presented here, that working-class respondents place an emphasis on material exchange in fi-iendship, has support in ethnographies of the working class and poor (Gans, 1982; Liebow, 1967, Stack, 1974). However, there is little support for this in network studies or other studies of friendship. Further study is needed to know to what degree the behaviors of middle- and working-class people reflect this difference in emphasis. Also, to what extent do other segments of the middle and working classes have friendships similar to those reported here?

Given the findings in this study, it is tempting to idealize the working- class patterns of exchange and reciprocity in an overly individualistic society. But, the flip side to the positive interdependence is conflict and resentment over whether someone owes someone else a favor. In addition, the concern over reputation and privacy among the working-class respondents was sometimes overwhelming. It is also tempting to idealize middle-class patterns of fi-iendship if one is interested in self-development and the expression of individuality. But middle-class friendships sometimes left respondents feeling isolated and alone. For the middle class, times of trouble are times when fi-iendship, whose focus is shared interests and leisure, may not survive.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge the many conversations about this project that I had with Robin Leidner, Vicki Smith, Chuck Bosk, and Harold Ber- shady. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and M.E. Hughes for their comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript.

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