           !       VOL. 5 | ISSUE 5 | MAY 2018 207 www.newmanpublication.com 41. Female friendship and Sisterhood as a Significant Theme in Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale Radhika Subhankar Mukherjee Department of English Satish Pradhan Dnyanasadhana College, Thane, Maharashtra, India. Abstract McMillan’s third novel Waiting to Exhale is a popular one that throw light on the concerns of the middle- class African American women at large. Waiting to Exhale tells the stories of four professional single black women, who are in their late thirties, namely; Savannah Jackson, Robin Strokes, Bernadine Harris and Gloria Matthews. She tried to explore the themes of female friendship and the sisterhood bonding among the four women which enables them to tackle their problems in life. These four characters rely on each other for friendship and consider each other like sisters. The lively narrativedeals with children, divorce, betrayal, jobs, parenting, lifestyles and dreams of the four female protagonists. This paper is an attempt to trace the significance of female friendship in African American Community with special reference to Waiting to Exhale. It is also a study to explore the solidarity of sisterhood in Terry McMillan’s novel Waiting to Exhale. Key Words: Friendship, Female friendship and Sisterhood. Friendship is a “relationship of mutual affection between people” and it is a solider form of interpersonal bond between friends (Oxford Dictionaries 2012). Friendship has been studied not only in literature but also in communication, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. Friendship can be categorized as kindness, love, trust, loyalty, sympathy, affection, honesty, empathy and mutual understanding towards one another. Friendship in adulthood provides: “companionship, affection, as well as emotional support, and contributes positively to mental well-being and improved physical health” (Schulz 426). In literature, the shared experience of the female protagonists forms the foundation for female friendship as it helps women persevere because of their strong bonding, truthful and loyal relationships with each other. In literature, the female friendships always bloom and persist irrespective of their circumstances they come across in life. ‘Sisterhood’ is a term that has to be redefined on the basis of functional duties and experiences of a women being a sister. In a patriarchal society, Sisterhood also becomes an institution of operation or an agency of power that transforms the weak women as strong women. Functional sisterhood can be redefined as a relationship between two women, who are not necessarily biological sisters but they come together for their common benefits, sharing their responsibilities and try solving the problems of each other. Sisterhood implies the experiences of shared oppression, common victimization, community of similar interest and collective survival.Sisterhood in the context of African American culture has to be understood as what bell hooks explains: Sisterhood became yet another shield against reality, another support system. Their [white feminists’] version of sisterhood was informed by racist and classist assumptions about white womanhood, that the white “lady” (that is to say the bourgeois woman) should be protected from all that might upset or discomfort her and shielded from negative realities that might lead to confrontation. (hooks 296)