Friends Are the Cream of Life

American Jewish writers Mary Antin and Jessie Sampter met as teenagers in 1899. Throughout the next four decades, they wrote letters and visited each other, discussing literature, politics, and life. Independently, both women achieved some professional success. Antin's autobiography, The Promised Land, launched her to national fame, before she withdrew from public life to focus on religious pursuits. Sampter supported Zionist efforts from the United States, then moved to Palestine. Both women experimented with religious thought and intentional communities. Both women were disabled: Antin struggled with her mental and physical health; Sampter also struggled with mental health and had post-polio syndrome.Drawing on Antin and Sampter's correspondence with each other and with others, this article argues that their friendship was a crucial part of their subjectivity, their intellectual development, and their religious creativity. Intimacy and relationality were not merely supplementary to the real work of solitary thinkers but key for these women's intellectual and spiritual development. In studying Antin and Sampter's friendship, we suggest that studying disabled thinkers provides a lens for all significant friendships, in which each partner admits and permits vulnerability and each brings what they can. Their relationship points us to the importance of analyzing how bodies and vulnerability work in all friendships, and how the interdependence of non-romantic friendships can be essential to women's creative work as religious thinkers and practitioners. Antin and Sampter's friendship also demonstrates how religious thought happens within relationships, rather than being solely created by an autonomous, isolated subject

Creativity · Sociology · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Psychology · Social Psychology