“Tracing the history of the words frequently used to define and degrade women is a necessary step if we are to understand how gender oppression functions and reproduces itself,” writes Silvia Federici, in Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women. She continues:
The history of “gossip” is emblematic in this context. Through it we can follow two centuries of attacks on women at the dawn of modern England, when a term commonly indicating a close female friend turned into one signifying idle, backbiting talk, that is, talk potentially sowing discord, the opposite of the solidarity that female friendship implies and generates. Attaching a denigrating meaning to the term indicating friendship among women served to destroy the female sociality that had prevailed in the Middle Ages, when most of the activities women performed were of a collective nature and, in the lower classes at least, women formed a tight-knit community that was a source of strength unmatched in the modern era.
Traces of the use of the word are frequent in the literature of the period. Deriving from Old English terms God and sibb (akin), “gossip” originally meant “god-parent,” one who stands in a spiritual relation to the child to be baptized. In time, however, the term was used with a broader meaning. In early modern England the word “gossip” referred to companions in childbirth not limited to the midwife. It also became a term for women friends, with no necessary derogatory connotations.
Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women, page 35
(Fans of Nicola Griffith’s Hild will recognize a related word—gemæcce—one member of a formal female friendship or partnership.)
Federici goes on to note that, coinciding with the enclosures of the commons and early capitalist accumulation, female friendship was derogated and even forbidden:
Women were also brought to court and fined for “scolding,” while priests in their sermons thundered against their tongues. Wives especially were expected to be quiet, “obey their husband without question” and “stand in awe of them.” Above all they were instructed to make their husbands and their homes the center of their attentions and not spend time at the window or at the door. They were even discouraged from paying too many visits to their families after marriage, and above all from spending time with their female friends. Then, in 1547, “a proclamation was issued forbidding women to meet together to babble and talk” and ordering husbands to “keep their wives in their houses.” Female friendships were one of the targets of the witch hunts, as in the course of the trials accused women were forced under torture to denounce each other, friends turning in friends, daughters turning in their mothers.
Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women, page 40
We carry this legacy with us today. How many times have I heard someone (nearly always femme) say they know they shouldn’t engage in “gossip” at work? How many times have I heard a senior leader refer to a team member dismissively as a “gossip,” or criticize them for engaging in the same? We are, often unknowingly, reinscribing a story that demonizes women’s talk every time we repeat that use of the word. But it’s within our power to resurrect its original meaning, to use it as it was intended. To gossip, then, isn’t to malign or spread false rumors; it’s to share information and wisdom, to cultivate fellowship, to acknowledge that we are all equals, that we are all in this—this life, this work, this planet—together. That is, to gossip is an act of solidarity, even, at times, of love.
I am reminded here of Miriam Toews’ extraordinary novel, Women Talking. In it, a group of Mennonite women gather to talk about what to do with the revelation that the men of their village have been drugging and assaulting them for years. The events are a neat inversion of the witch hunts: rather than accuse the women themselves of being demons, the men claim the women are suffering from demons who have come to punish them for their sins. But it is the men, after all, who have done them harm. At one point, the old man whose hayloft they are squatting in wanders over and demands to know what’s going on. “We’re only women talking,” replies one of the women. Only women talking. But it was women talking that needed to be proscribed in order for capitalism to take hold; it was women talking that was a threat to the enclosure of the commons, and the enclosure of our bodies; it remains women talking—about their abortions, about their experience of being gendered and their choices therein, about their own skills and competencies—that represents such a threat to the status quo that whole brigades of trolls have been dispatched to drown them out. It is, in Toews’ novel, women talking who choose to bring about the end of their community, and in so doing, give birth to one anew.
Capitalism needed to disparage women’s talk in order to bring itself about because women’s talk—that is, talk that is liberatory, reciprocal, and mutual—is a powerful antidote to the violence, oppression, and theft that capitalism ushered in. That same disparaging force is at work today, in the forces toiling feverishly to restrict reproductive rights and to reinforce the gender binary—because the gender binary is a load-bearing pillar of capitalism. But as the edict to prohibit “babble” attests, only by isolating women, by preventing them from talking, from sharing their experiences with one another, from acting in concert, can that pillar be defended.
This represents an opportunity: if capitalism needs women to be quiet, then women talking is one key to ending capitalism. Gather your gossips around you, friends, we’ve got work to do.
