The Women of Brewster Place

The Women of Brewster Place is a novel about sisterhood and the healing power of female friendship. Throughout the novel, women come together despite their differences to support and nurture one another, healing the wounds inflicted by a racist, patriarchal society. Faced with abuse and violence at the hands of men, the various women of Brewster Place forge relationships that become a spiritual antidote to the perpetual assault of the outside world. The love of another woman is often lifesaving, and the women who lack this support, like Lorraine, fail to flourish. 

Within the novel’s tight-knit community of women, Mattie is the central figure in the execution of this theme. Because Eva Turner helps Mattie when she is a young single mother struggling to survive, Mattie finds many different ways to show other young women the same “unexplained kindness” (34) that she experienced, and in her old age, she finds herself playing a matriarchal role and offering much-needed support to those around her. Her closest relationships can be found in her best friend Etta and her surrogate daughter Lucielia, and the most dramatic representation of Mattie’s healing power occurs when she pulls Ciel back from the brink of depression when the younger woman is near death after the loss of her baby daughter.