Katharine Cramer Walsh shows how political conversation friendship, and identity evolve together, creating stronger communities and social ties. But she also reveals how such informal discussion can have negative effects, reinforcing boundaries and encouraging exclusivity.

Pragmatic political reasons exist for insisting on the possibility of thinking about women as some kind of group. An argument is presented for reconceptualizing social collectivity or the meaning of social groups as what Jean-Paule Sartre describes as a phenomenon of serial collectivity in his "Critique of Dialectical Reason."