Bitches, besties and the female clique

When I was a teenager, I was one of the Sydenham Six. While the label would be more fitting for a band of fugitives than a collective of girls from the same school, the meaning it imparted was nonetheless immediate: we were a clique. 

 We didn’t give ourselves this rather unflattering title, but were branded for our coexistence by the boys from a nearby school, where we did a lot of hanging out together. In fact there were more than just six of us, but I suppose six was an easier number to convene than eight or ten, and so this may have been the amount most commonly found in one place at any one time. 

We were very often at each others’ houses, and favoured the homes of those with more permissive parents who didn’t rise to the evidential smell of cigarette smoke, or enforce strict night time curfews. We would gather before school, after school, occasionally skive together, and then reconvene for social gatherings at weekends. Even the teachers referred to us as ‘the gang’. 

During the ‘80s, we styled ourselves in the image of the Gatecrasher Ball, although we were far from regulars at these debauched toffs’ parties. We’d either hunt out vintage dresses from second hand shops or spend our savings from Saturday jobs on Laura Ashley ball gowns.  The frocks would be teamed with clumsy DMs and felt brimmed hats, and sometimes unlikely items for effect, such as a father’s paisley dressing gown or grandmother’s dowdy tweed coat. In our pockets would be the qualifying Marlboro Lights or Consulates, and swinging from our hands would pass a bottle of Thunderbird. On the upper decks of London buses, banished from local pubs, on the wrong side of locked park gates after dark, on the banks of the school hockey pitch, we could be found collaborating in minor misdemeanours. 

Belonging to an adolescent, all-female gang was both empowering and destructive. As a group, we were a force to be reckoned with; the whole certainly seemed greater than the sum of its parts. From the inside, we were a supportive sisterhood of young feminists: opinionated girls from an all-girls school, defining, protecting and bolstering each other in our social lives and academic achievements, and commiserating in our failures. We believed in ourselves and, what’s more, we believed in each other. But being so tight came at a price. As part of a whole, each of us had a rather restrictive role to play, a role that was hard to shake. And yes, there was jealousy and there were arguments, a little vying for alpha-supremacy, stealing of boyfriends and clashing of personalities. Some of the women who were once members of our all-girl gang do not remember these years fondly at all. But some of us have maintained an evolving friendship, which still feels terribly fundamental. It’s as though the secrets and intimacies we shared at such a formative time were enough that we could never be strangers. The need for teenage girls to belong seems universal and instinctive, and the bonds forged are not easily forgotten, whether they were cliquey or not. 

Some twenty five years on, I look back and see how the door to our clique was firmly shut. Although we all had friends outside the group and there were members on the periphery who’d join us sometimes, we made ourselves pretty exclusive. It seems strange to me now that I didn’t consider how others may feel left out, maybe want to join the ranks, or perhaps were just struggling to be seen behind our egocentric united front. We weren’t purposely bitchy, but there must have been some who thought we were.

Even in middle age we need go no further than the school gates to come up against the kind of female glass bubbles that wield the power to turn us into outcasts. Only this time, we’re the mothers.

At its best, a close group of female friends provides the kind of solidarity that many dream of: a cooperative network to provide practical and emotional support, and a true sense of belonging – the qualities I hope my daughters’ friendships will hold. But at its worse, a clique is desperately isolating to others. You only have to google ‘cliques’ to see that book stores, discussion forums and psychiatrists couches are awash with women seeking advice on how to cope with the pain of exclusion. A 2003 study by the University of California showed that social exclusion actually activates the same area of the brain that registers physical pain. Rejection hurts.

Five of the Sydenham Six, now in our 40s, meet one evening for a meal at our regular haunt, just up the hill from our old school. It’s a cold, wet, dark weekday.  

‘If I’d planned to meet anyone else this evening, I really couldn’t have been bothered to come out and make conversation,’ one friend confides, ‘But it’s so easy being here with you lot, I almost left my slippers on.’ 

Nowadays, I hang out with my old friends so rarely that it isn’t exclusive of others. When we get together, it still feels like the old gang, and I immensely enjoy the references to shared experiences past, enduring intimacy and sense of belonging. But I have not sought a similar bond with another group of women since I was a teen. There’s a time and a place.

As an adult, I like to choose my friends as individuals. Woe betide that I should become part of something that has the capacity to unwittingly become a monster.