Female Friendship
The friendship among the women in "Boys on the Side" challenges existing social structure because of who the women are and how tight a bond they form. The women are from different races and social classes and a middle class white woman being friends with a lower class black woman, and a lesbian to boot, simply was not allowed. And add in the friend who was beaten by her boyfriend and is pregnant and you get a very unusual group of women who would never be considered normal. The women all settling down into one house together stretches the boundaries even further. They become their own tight little family and attempt to look out for each other when society expects women to compete with each other for men and considers families to be a mother and father and a child or two. But then at the end the "normal family" is reinscribed because Holly marries Abe and they have a child and their own house. They have gone back to the "normal" mother, father, child type of family with a cute house and no extra women.