Growing up, watching Girlfriends felt familiar. Four Black women in LA dissecting their love lives, careers, insecurities, and each other over a lot of wine, and a lot more sarcasm. It was funny. Dramatic. A little chaotic. But it wasn’t until I got older that I realized the show was quietly shaping how I understood Black womanhood — and, eventually, Black feminist thinking.
Long before I ever read bell hooks or Audre Lorde, or sat with the layered womanhood in Toni Morrison’s novels, I was watching Joan Clayton struggle with self-worth, Antionette “Toni” Childs demand softness and luxury, Maya Wilkes evolve beyond respectability politics, and Lynn Searcy search endlessly for identity. I didn’t have the language for it then, but I was witnessing complexity. And that mattered.
One of the most radical things Girlfriends did was allow Black women to be messy. The characters were ambitious and insecure. Loyal and selfish. Loving and deeply flawed. Growing up, I was used to seeing Black women portrayed as either strong beyond measure or reduced to stereotypes. But Joan could be a successful lawyer and still unravel over a man. Toni could crave wealth and still carry abandonment wounds. Maya could love hard and outgrow the version of herself she started with. And Lynn could reject convention and stability, drifting between identities and ambitions, while still searching for a place where she truly belonged.Â
When I later read Toni Morrison’s work and saw how she centered the interior lives of Black women — their desires, contradictions, silences — I recognized that same emphasis in Girlfriends. It showed up in the long conversations around Joan’s kitchen table, the pauses after arguments, the moments when a joke slowly unraveled into a confession. The show allowed Black women to be messy, selfish, loving, confused, and evolving all at once. Their emotions weren’t rushed past for the sake of comedy; they were examined, turned over, and understood. The show insisted that Black women deserved depth. That our internal conflicts were worthy of screen time. That we were not side characters in our own stories.
The older I get, especially now as I’m navigating adulthood, the more I understand how formative that was. Watching those women fail and recalibrate gave me permission to do the same. It suggested that becoming isn’t linear. That self-definition is ongoing.
bell hooks writes about love as intentional, as a practice rather than a feeling. When I look back at Girlfriends, I see that philosophy woven throughout the show — not just in romantic relationships, but also in friendship. The women confronted each other. They argued. They held mirrors up to one another in ways that were uncomfortable but necessary. Their friendship wasn’t always soft, but it was solid.
That idea has followed me into my own friendships. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that being in community with other Black women (especially my best friend) means accountability as much as affirmation. It means having hard conversations about ambition, jealousy, insecurity, and growth. It means allowing each other to change.
Audre Lorde wrote that community is not about sameness but about recognizing and respecting difference. The women on Girlfriends were not identical in values, class backgrounds, or life goals. Toni prioritized luxury. Joan clung to stability. Lynn resisted capitalism. Maya navigated motherhood and class mobility. And yet, they chose each other — over and over again.
Watching that as a young girl normalized something powerful: Black women do not have to agree on everything to be in solidarity. We can hold tension. We can disagree and still love each other. That lesson feels especially relevant now, as I navigate adulthood and realize that friendship is not accidental — it is constructed, nurtured, and sometimes rebuilt.Now that I’ve started rewatching Girlfriends in my 20s, I’m seeing it differently. It feels like rereading a book I once skimmed — the story is the same, but the meaning has shifted. Because, it turns out, Girlfriends wasn’t just a sitcom — it was my first syllabus on Black womanhood, before I even knew I was studying.