Learn about how growing up in Charleston shaped her views
Charleston has long been known for its tucked-away gardens, but a 1973 book by Nancy Colbert Friday revealed a different type of hidden oasis nurtured in the city. In My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies, which became a best seller, she explored women’s physical desires based on hundreds of interviews.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on August 27, 1933, Friday, along with her mother and sister, moved here when she was five, sent by her grandfather Charles F. Colbert, Jr., who was constructing the Pittsburgh Metallurgical Company on the Ashley River. Growing up south of Broad Street, she says she observed what “good” girls were expected not to do and what others who escaped that category could do.
Nancy Colbert Friday wrote the 1973 best seller My Secret Garden: Women‘s Sexual Fantasies and later My Mother My Self, exploring women‘s physical desires and relationships.
After graduating from Ashley Hall in 1951, Friday became a journalist and gained fame as an author on women’s issues, sexuality, and other subjects then-considered taboo. Breaking from the “strictures that such closed societies [as Charleston] lay down,” as she wrote in My Mother My Self (Delta, 1997), Friday had a national media presence, appearing on Oprah, Politically Incorrect, with Larry King, and on NPR. While angering some feminists, she argued that women should not take society’s standards and expectations at face value but scrutinize them.
“All my life, I’ve judged the beauty of other cities by Charleston where you can’t see gardens from the street. You have to be invited in,” she wrote. Friday died in New York City on November 5, 2017, acknowledging that—metaphorically and psychologically—she was shaped by the city where she spent her formative years.
