Whispers and Wives’ Tales: A History of Women & Gossip in Premodern Society

Whispers and Wives’ Tales: A History of Women & Gossip in Premodern Society

Written by Marissa Rhodes, PhD

Recorded by Marissa Rhodes, PhD and Averill Earls, PhD

Marissa: On September 9, 1838, a humble woman named Mary Grout descended the stairs outside of her cramped apartment on Rich-street in the poverty-stricken Limehouse district of London. She was visiting her neighbor, Sara Tarrall who lived two floors below her. The women sat in Sara’s room, chatting happily when Mary’s husband, Abraham appeared at the door, demanding that Mary fetch him an ounce of tobacco from the store. Perturbed, Mary replied, “I shall not.” Abraham demanded that she send one of their children to the store for it. Mary replied, “I am ashamed to send the children; they are so deplorable.” Mary was embarrassed by the ragged state of her children, though she did the best she could with few resources.

Averill: Abraham slammed the door and yelled, “Go to hell, you vermin!” As the enraged Abraham ascended the stairs to their apartment, he grumbled that Mary was “fit for nothing but sitting gossiping in a neighbor’s house.” He resolved to “poke her in the eye” when he saw her again. Mary and Sara continued chatting for a while, probably about Mary’s difficult husband, or maybe about the vagaries of raising families in the extreme poverty both women were forced to confront on a daily basis. Some time later, Mary took her leave and went back upstairs to her apartment.

Less than an hour later, Mary was yelling for help, her eye, and the rest of her body, bloodied and bruised. Her ten and twelve year old sons ran from the house, looking for a police constable. When the constable saw Mary’s condition, he send her to Whitechapel Hospital where she later succumbed to her injuries. Abraham had beaten his wife to death. During his trial, Abraham and Mary’s neighbors testified to the couple’s character. Mary’s fellow gossip, Sara, testified to Mary’s good character and to another incident in which Abraham acted crudely. Sara surmised that Abraham was a drunk.

Marissa: The Grouts’s nextdoor neighbor, James Hats, testified that he was awoken by Mary’s foul language and that she called Abraham foul names. Hats even said that Mary exclaimed

“It is my own fault!” during the argument. When asked what he had to say for himself in court, Abraham responded, “I have no more to say than it was through aggravation and abuse that I struck her, she being away from me at different times.” He was found guilty but the jury, which sympathized with Abraham, recommended leniency. He was sentenced to four months imprisonment.

Averill: We only know about Mary’s and Sara’s quick “gossip” because of its role in Mary’s death. Even though her gossiping contributed to her death, we have no idea what Mary and Sara spoke about that night. This is because women’s words, their “gossip,” was considered unserious and unimportant to men. Ironically, however, women’s gossip was incredibly threatening to the men in their lives and women who gossiped were deemed, by men, to be dangerous to the social order. This is why the jury sympathized with Abraham and why his sentence was lenient. So what does this mean? That women’s words are too unimportant to be recorded but dangerous enough to partially justify their murder? This contradiction gets to the heart of gossip’s gendered history.

Marissa: In one way, this is a history of language, but in another way, it’s a history of the way gendered ideas shaped pre-modern societies. Dale Spender, a feminist literary scholar, wrote in 1980: “It is not surprising to find that there are no terms for man talk that are equivalent to chatter, natter, prattle, nag, bitch, whine, and of course, gossip, and I am not so naive as to assume that this is because men do not engage in these activities. It is because when they do, it is called something different, something more flattering and more appropriate to their place in the world. This double standard is of great value in the maintenance of patriarchal order.”

From the feminist perspective, dismissing women’s talk as “gossip” was a useful tool to reinforce the patriarchy. Punishing women who were known “gossips” was a strategy devised by men to neutralize the threat of gossip to their authority whether that be in the home or in the community. This is an important thread in the history but, as always, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Join us as we explore the history of gossip in the Western (primarily English-speaking) world.

I’m Marissa

And I’m Averill

Marissa: and we are your historians of this episode of Dig.

Averill: We are so thankful for all of our Patreon supporters – especially our Auger and Excavator level patrons:  Karl, Alissa, Maria, Colin, Denise, Edward, Jessy, Judy, Karen, Lauren, Lisa, Megan, and Susan! We can’t thank you enough. Listener, if you enjoy what we do here but aren’t yet a patron of this show, it’s easy: just go to patreon.com/digpodcast to learn more.

Marissa: At its most basic, gossip is words spoken between two people about people who are not present. Sociologically, gossip serves important functions like social bonding, building trust, enforcing communal values, and challenging authority. The complexity of gossip becomes more clear when we look at premodern gossip, before its associations with rag mags in the grocery aisle, shameless paparazzi, and privileged teens in NYC. This complexity still exists today but because of all of gossip’s modern “baggage” it’s more difficult to untangle.

Prior to mass literacy, spoken words held a power that may seem foreign to us in a literary and digital world. The concept of “common fame” (today we would call this rumor) was used as iron-clad evidence in court cases in medieval and early modern England, especially rumors about sexuality that held sway over contested marriages or illegitimate birth. One of the most important factors in a person’s judicial fate was their reputation. Moreover, medieval and early modern economies ran on lines of credit, bartering, and favor networks that were more or less available to folks depending on their reputation in the community. Gossip was not only crucial to reputation-formation but also self-policing (in an era without a professional police force), and social bonds (in an economy of makeshift where neighbors relied on each other to get by). So despite its pejorative connotations, gossip, and the women who indulged in it, were crucial to survival in pre-modern societies.

Averill: But first, the elephant in the room; gossip has a very gendered history. Note Marissa said “the WOMEN who indulged in it” rather than the PEOPLE. That’s because gossip has long been considered a behavior peculiar to women. Sociologists have found no evidence that women gossip more than men but, rather, that things women say are more likely to be labeled gossip just by virtue of the fact that it came out of a woman’s mouth. These gendered labels are common in patriarchal societies and we see it with the written word as well.

Feminist scholars have challenged traditional negative valuations of gossip, arguing that its association with women has led to its systematic devaluation. In her scholarship on the role of women in the invention of the novel, Dale Spender wrote: “The term ‘romantic’ fiction is used in much the same way to designate the printed word of women as ‘gossip’ is used to designate the spoken word of women. It is an all-encompassing (and derogatory) term that places women’s words beyond serious consideration. Neither ‘romantic fiction’ no ‘gossip’ warrant analysis. Their inferior status is based not on an analysis but quite the reverse; such labels preclude analysis.”^[1]

Marissa: Since the 1970s, historians, social scientists, and literary scholars have been making up for lost time by analyzing the spoken and written words of women, often for the first time. Anthropologists like Max Gluckman argued that gossip serves essential social functions: maintaining group cohesion, establishing norms, and managing conflict without direct confrontation. Robin Dunbar’s “grooming and gossip” hypothesis suggests gossip evolved as a form of social grooming, allowing humans to maintain larger social networks than other primates. From this perspective, gossip is not a social problem but a social solution.

Averill: Michel Foucault’s analysis of power helps us understand gossip as both a disciplinary mechanism and a form of resistance. Gossip operates as a capillary form of power, flowing through social networks rather than descending from authorities. Yet gossip also provides weapons for the weak, allowing subordinated groups to share information, build solidarity, and sometimes damage the reputations of the powerful.

Marissa: James C. Scott’s concept of “hidden transcripts” identifies gossip as a key component of resistance cultures. Enslaved peoples, colonized populations, and workers have used gossip networks to share information about oppressors, coordinate resistance, and maintain cultural identity outside official channels. Patricia Meyer Spacks’s “Gossip” argues that women’s gossip creates alternative epistemic networks that challenge official knowledge systems. The #MeToo movement demonstrated how gossip networks—”whisper networks” warning about sexual predators—provided protection when official channels failed.

In short, these scholars have discovered that gossiping is much more than idle talk. Gossip has the potential to be a tool of social control and resistance, a means of building community and destroying reputations, or a source of entertainment and anxiety, or all of the above. But gossips’ function in society, and its meaning to historical people, has evolved over time. Let’s spend the rest of the episode exploring gossip in different times and places to get an idea of the different ways gossip functioned in premodern people’s lives.

Averill: In medieval society, gossip operated within tightly bounded communities where reputation was currency and social surveillance was constant. The medieval village, with its average population of 50-300 people, created an environment where everyone’s business was potentially everyone else’s concern. The physical architecture of medieval life—shared wells, common fields, narrow streets, and thin-walled houses—facilitated constant observation and commentary.

The church played a paradoxical role in medieval gossip culture. While officially condemning idle talk through sermons against the “sins of the tongue,” ecclesiastical courts relied heavily on local gossip networks to identify and prosecute moral transgressions. The practice of compurgation, where accused individuals could clear their names by producing oath-helpers willing to swear to their good character, made reputation—shaped largely by gossip—a matter of legal significance.

Marissa: Christian devotees, especially women devotees were often the victims of the most malicious gossiping. Margery Kempe, an English mystic born in 1373, was tormented by wagging tongues all her life. Kempe spent most of her life as a married woman and mother but she always felt guilt for her inability to remain a virgin. The virgin state was idealized by the medieval Catholic church. Kempe drew attention to herself because of her loud weeping during mass. Kempe committed herself to chastity later in life, an action that invited scrutiny. She was threatened with rape and accused time and again of being a loose woman, a common accusation hurled at female visionaries and mystics.

Unsurprisingly, medieval gossip was deeply gendered in both practice and perception. Women’s gossip, often occurring in female-dominated spaces like washing places, lying-in chambers, and markets, was simultaneously feared and legally marginalized. The figure of the “scold”—a woman who disturbed community peace through excessive talk—became subject to specific legal punishments including the cucking stool and the scold’s bridle. These brutal devices, which physically prevented speech or subjected women to public humiliation, reveal the anxiety surrounding female verbal power.

Averill: Yet women’s gossip networks also served crucial social functions. They transmitted medical knowledge, particularly regarding childbirth and contraception, monitored courtship behaviors, and enforced sexual norms. Indeed, this is how the term gossip was derived. Initially meaning godparent (both male and female), gossips came to refer to the neighbor women and friends who attended birthing mothers in labor. More than just a one-off event, childbirthing was a nearly constant cycle that formed networks of female authority. A mother’s gossips assisted the midwife, boiling water, bringing snacks, minding her other children, mopping her brow and bracing her body as she birthed her child.

Once the baby was born, the gossips remained, throwing a sort of post-birth girl-party. Medieval women were ritually confined to their beds for some time after birth so it was the gossips who arranged for the new child’s christening (this is why ‘gossips’ initially meant godparent). Forty-one days after the birth, the gossips arranged the new mother’s “churching.” This ceremony was meant to wash away the impurities of childbirth and usher the mother back into normal life. The gossip networks that were forged in this endless cycle of reciprocal, neighborly care operated in domestic spaces, in the streets, and at communal gathering places. But they could be just as powerful as official, male-dominated social structures.

Marissa: What about “celebrity gossip” in the medieval era? Well… medieval courts were as close to “celebrities” as existed at the time. In royal courts, gossip was political intelligence. The cultivation of informants, the strategic spreading of rumors, and the management of reputation were essential political skills. Chronicles and correspondence from the period reveal how rulers actively managed gossip networks. The medieval practice of “fame”—public reputation established through common talk—could determine everything from creditworthiness to legal standing to marriage prospects.

The case of Eleanor of Aquitaine illustrates gossip’s political potency. Rumors about her conduct during the Second Crusade, including alleged affairs with her uncle and with Saladin, were weaponized during her divorce from Louis VII and continued to shape her historical reputation centuries after her death. Whether true or false, such gossip had real political consequences, influencing succession disputes and international alliances. It also gave elite women, the kind of women who would have been privy to the Queen’s activities, the ability to subtly influence political affairs without ever appearing to have stepped out of line. Gossiping is as girly as it gets, right?

Averill: Historian Bernard Capp studied ordinary, early modern women’s lives extensively and he found that, for most women, gossip played very mundane but important roles in their lives. Premodern women’s days could be tedious. They had to do a lot of monotonous work like sewing, spinning, washing clothes by hand– all things that took massive amounts of time but were not very mentally stimulating. They were also likely to have to use communal facilities for most of their chores. Thomas Baskerville wrote in 1681 that the women in the town of Winchcombe carried their loaves and pies to the local baker’s every morning. Women often knitted or spun wool as they walked. While their goods were baking in the communal ovens, the townswomen chatted with their friends, still working their needles or spindles as they spoke. Gossip entertained Winchcombe’s women during their tedious tasks and strengthened their bonds with other locals.

Towns like Nottingham, Southampton, and Winchester designated public washing facilities for the townswomen to use. Doing the washing in those towns developed into a social event where everyone caught up on the town gossip. Compared to other Europeans, early modern English women were afforded much freedom of movement. But even women without communal facilities or designated meeting places found ways to interact with their neighbors. Historical documents are filled with references to women knitting or sewing in their doorways. In addition to the superior lighting, doorway chores allowed women to observe the happenings nearby and to socialize with others in the streets.

Marissa: In early modern Venice, where respectable women were ritually enclosed (listen to our Recogimiento episode for more), female Venetians nonetheless found ways to participate fully in street life. Historian Alexander Cowan found that early modern Venetians distinguished public from private differently from how we might today. Venetians observed the streets from their terraces, windows, and doorways, interpreting what they saw as their neighbors went about their days. Then they shared their intel discreetly with peers. Using documents generated by investigations into mixed marriages, Cowan uncovered complex gossip networks that Venetians had built based on combinations of observation and spoken words. Cowan found that Venetian neighbors looked into each other’s houses via windows and doorways. They socialized and spied from the terraces of upper stories- all without leaving their own homes.

It’s worth noting that in the court cases Cowan was studying, men were just as likely as women to eavesdrop or spy on, and gossip about their neighbors. While it was unseemly for elite, reclusive Venetian women to “gossip,” the latest news always reached their household by way of their servants whose intel from the streets was relayed to their masters. Upper class kitchens (which were servant-only spaces) served as the hubs of the town’s gossip because women servants were afforded more mobility than the lady of the house.

Averill: The Venetian context suggests that the feminist interpretation of gossip may not tell the whole story. For example, the feminist interpretation of gossip suggests that women worked WITH each other to challenge patriarchal power structures. But this was not always the case. Historian Laura Gowing published a comprehensive study of defamation cases in the 16th and 17th centuries in 1996. She showed that there was a dramatic increase in defamation cases between 1570 and 1620. Gowing’s scholarship suggests that women just as often used the weapon of gossip against other women. This was especially the case when wives (who had no legal recourse against a cheating husband) used gossip to target their romantic rivals instead.

For example, Alice Rochester accosted Jane Lilham on her doorstep one winter’s day in Whitechapel in 1610. The scene was described as highly public, with Alice and Jane’s neighbors all “at work” in their doorways (remember it was common for women to do tedious work in their doorway.) Alice yelled: “Thow art a whore and an arrant whore and a common carted whore and thow art my husbandes whore… my husband hath kept thee a great while at Newcastle and all that he got he spent on thee… thow art my husbands whore thow hast lyne oftener with him than he hath done with me.”^[2]

Marissa: Alice’s tirade was public for a reason. She knew that her words would be heard by their neighbors and almost certainly repeated, the accusation traveling like wildfire. Alice’s aim was almost certainly to permanently damage Jane’s reputation. If Alice’s plan worked, it would be harder for Jane to solicit favors, less likely for her to be extended credit, or good references for a job. It also would have been difficult for her to extricate herself from the sexual shame she’d incurred from Alice’s words. This could prevent her from finding a spouse, land her in court for fornication, or even invite sexual violence from lecherous neighbors. Gossip could be a powerful tool that disgruntled women used against their enemies, whom, they knew, were as vulnerable as they were. In this case, Jane sued Alice in church court for slander and their neighbors were called to testify to the event.

Averill: Of course, the printing press revolutionized gossip by allowing rumors to spread beyond face-to-face networks. Pamphlets, broadsheets, and early newspapers created what we might call “mass gossip”—standardized rumors that could reach thousands simultaneously. The English Civil War saw an explosion of printed gossip, with rival factions producing scandalous accounts of their enemies’ private lives. The Thomason Tracts, a collection of over 22,000 pamphlets from this period, preserve a remarkable record of weaponized gossip.

The most prominent example involved the publication of captured private letters between King Charles I and his wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, following the Battle of Naseby in 1645. Propagandist Marchamont Nedham published these letters from a captured Royalist baggage train, which portrayed “the King as a weak man bewitched by his Catholic queen.” Henrietta Maria faced constant attacks for being Catholic, with critics calling her a “whore” (notably by William Prynne in his 1632 work “Histriomastix”) and referring to her as “the popish brat of France.” Figures like Marchamont Nedham paved “the way for personal attacks being used as propaganda”.^[3]

Marissa: Since historians deal with documentary evidence, the post-printing-press publishing boom has given us a lot of material to work with. During the 1600s, we see a proliferation of conduct literature, almost all of it written by men, and almost all of it identifying “gossip” as uniquely feminine and uniquely threatening to social order. Some of this literature frames female gossip as merely a nuisance: “what an excellent thing it would be if people would mind their own business… of all the wives that plague men’s lives and keep them from their rest, a gossiping wife makes the top of the list.”^[4]

Most male authors took it for granted that everyone would agree that women were thoughtless. One conduct author wrote that women “are generally an unthinking sort of creatures, and scarce reflexive on what they say, being overruled by their passions.” He warned readers that “to laugh as women do sometimes, with their hands on both sides, and with a lascivious agitation of their whole body, is the height of indecency and immodesty.”^[5] One proverb went, “Where many geese be, be many turds. And where be many women, be many words.”^[6] Advice to married couples typically went something like this, “Husbands must hold their hands and wives their tongues.”

Averill: Now this view of women is often surprising to our listeners because we are living on the other side of the Victorian era. The Victorian era was peculiar in that it developed gender roles that marked women as “angels of the home, “ the models of morality, with pure souls and an endless capacity for self-denial. This was unique to the Victorian era. But since this is one of the closest historical eras to our own time, we tend to project Victorian norms backward, assuming that it must have always been like that “back then.” But this is far from the truth. Until the Victorian era, women in the Western world were seen as impulsive, obtrusive, and lacking self-control.^[7] Humoral theory held that “vaginas were active, devouring organs, and that sexually voracious women required orgasm to conceive.”^[8]

The Preacher Matthew Griffith snidely remarked that women would do well to remember that Eve had been created from Adam’s side, not his brain. He warned them not to behave “as if you had wisdom and discretion enough of your selves.”^[9] The puritan William Gouge wrote, “an husband carrieth a resemblance of Christ, and is after manner a Saviour, employing his superior reason, moral judgement, and strength to redeem his wife from the consequences of her frailty.”^[10] It’s easy to see why men who understood women in this way were threatened by gossip. It was something that could be powerful and impactful that happened outside of their control and presence.

Marissa: All of this is to say that in the early modern period, the typical woman was seen as “too loud,” “too careless,” and too “out of control” to run her life herself. As a result, the historical record is full of men accusing their women-folk of gathering with their gossips to mock their husbands, betray family secrets, swap strategies for manipulation or deception, or to otherwise step outside of the bounds of proper wifehood. Some men accused women of using their gossip-networks to commit infidelity undetected (could women CLAIM they had to nurse a sick friend but then actually go to cheat on their husbands?). Early modern men were most horrified by the possibility that their wives would discuss their sexual prowess (or lack thereof) with her friends. It’s hard for us to know the content of women’s gossip from the early modern period, but Bernard Capp argues that the content is not all that relevant. According to Capp, “Women’s talk was stigmatized as gossip not because it differed in character from men’s, but because it was perceived as the subversive behaviour of subordinates.”^[11]

Averill: Conduct literature contained endless references to this malicious, subversive form of gossip but Capp found that essentially ALL of it is fictional, apocryphal– stories imagined by men in the throes of a full-blown masculinity crisis. For example, William Gouge wrote in Of Domesticall Duties in 1622 that “when tattling gossips meet, their usual prate is about their husbands, complaining of some vice or other in them, ‘My husband,’ sayeth one, ‘is covetous: I cannot get of him anything almost: he maketh me go as nobody goeth. And my husband,’ replieth another, ‘is so furious as none can tell how to speak to him.’”… Recall that Gouge literally invented this conversation on his own. This is how he imagines women’s gossip to be.

Marissa: In the 1707 collection of poems, Fifteen Plagues of Maidenhead, a lonely spinster laments that she must toil alone:

“Whilst those that married are, invited be

To labours, christenings, where the jollitry

Of women lies in telling, as some say,

When ‘twas they did at hoity-toity play,

Whose husband’s yard is longest, whilst another

Can’t in the least her great misfortune smother,

So tells, her husband’s bauble is so short,

That when he hunts, he never shows her sport.”

Again, there is no lonely spinster who is saying all of these things about married women. This was written by a man who was pretending to be a lonely spinster who was pretending to know what married women talk about. Capp argues that these tracts tell us more about male anxieties than they do about women’s actual speech.

Averill: The stories we do have about women’s gossip comes from legal documents. There are many examples of women who used gossip to circumvent the limitations of a patriarchal society. In 1579, a London alewife came home to discover that her landlord had come to collect the rent but, instead, he took some woman up to the bedchamber and was fornicating with her loudly. The woman didn’t know what to do and felt too uncomfortable interrupting them so she called over a friend. The friend was also afraid of the landlord. The two women did the only thing they felt safe doing: confiding in their gossips about the incident. In this case, the gossip actually led to prosecution and the landlord was fined £10.

It’s unclear though if all women used gossip in this way and with this intention. For example, Margaret Knowlesley, a servant in Nantwich, was being sexually harassed by her employer. She confided in her gossips about it in 1627. She was mortified to discover that they had spread the story around town. She retracted the allegations and was flogged publicly for her slander. We can’t know for sure but it’s possible Knowlesley’s master WAS harassing her but that her own shame led her to shut down the gossip. She suffered for it. 

Marissa: Gossips could also support each other in lives of crime. Indeed, Capp found several instances of women’s gossip-networks being used to commit crime like theft or the fencing of stolen goods. Most documentation of gossip that Laura Gowing and Alexander Cowan found involved just as many men as women, sometimes in mixed company, sometimes just entire groups of men “chewing the fat.” This is a reminder that even though gossip was (and perhaps still is?) coded as feminine, there were just as many men gossiping as women.

Perhaps the best example of male hives of gossip is the tavern or the pub, where the lower classes drank, mixed, and made merry. But this scene was somewhat disrupted by the coffee house. Coffee houses became new centers for gossip exchange as they emerged in the 17th century. Unlike taverns, which were associated with lower-class disorder, coffee houses positioned themselves as respectable venues for public discourse. Yet contemporary accounts reveal they were equally sites of rumor-mongering, character assassination, and information trading. Lloyd’s of London began in Edward Lloyd’s coffee house, where maritime gossip about ships, cargoes, and captains laid the foundation for the modern insurance industry.

Averill: Norbert Elias’s “civilizing process” thesis helps explain how the early modern functions of gossip evolved into the gossip culture we are more familiar with today. As European societies developed more elaborate codes of manners and self-restraint, gossip became both more subtle and more powerful. The royal courts of Versailles under Louis XIV exemplified this transformation. Court gossip, encoded in elaborate etiquette and inference, could determine access to patronage, military appointments, and royal favor. The memoir literature of the period, from Saint-Simon to Madame de Sévigné, documents a world where gossip was both entertainment and survival strategy.

The concept of “scandal” emerged as a distinct category during this period, particularly through the development of scandal chronicles and secret histories. Works like Delarivier Manley’s “The New Atalantis” (1709) used thinly veiled fiction to spread gossip about real political figures, creating a new genre that blurred the lines between literature, journalism, and rumor.

Marissa: Enlightenment thinkers developed sophisticated critiques of gossip as antithetical to rational public discourse. Jürgen Habermas’s account of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere identifies gossip as what this new rational-critical debate defined itself against. Yet even as philosophers condemned gossip, Enlightenment salons—often hosted by women—relied on sophisticated gossip networks to share ideas, build reputations, and influence policy.

The period also saw the emergence of the “right to privacy” as a concept, partly in response to increasingly intrusive gossip cultures. The notion that individuals possessed a private sphere that should be protected from public scrutiny represented a revolutionary shift from medieval assumptions about community surveillance.

Averill: The 19th century’s massive urbanization created new contexts for gossip. In the anonymous city, gossip networks had to be actively constructed rather than naturally occurring. The Victorian period saw the emergence of specialized gossip institutions: society pages, gossip columnists, and private inquiry agents. The paradox of urban life—simultaneous anonymity and scrutiny—created new anxieties about reputation management.

Victorian sexuality became a particular focus of gossip anxiety. The Oscar Wilde trials of 1895 demonstrated how gossip about sexual behavior could destroy even the most celebrated figures. The period’s elaborate mourning rituals, calling card protocols, and chaperonage systems can be understood as attempts to manage gossip about propriety and sexual conduct.

Marissa: The 20th century witnessed the democratization of gossip through mass media. Hollywood’s studio system initially tried to control star gossip through publicity departments, but columnists like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons accumulated independent power through their gossip networks. The transition from controlled publicity to paparazzi culture in the 1960s marked a shift from managed to invasive gossip systems.

Television brought gossip into domestic spaces with unprecedented immediacy. Shows like “The Tonight Show” made celebrity gossip a nightly ritual, while soap operas provided fictional communities for viewers to gossip about. The parasocial relationships viewers developed with media figures created new forms of one-sided gossip where the subjects were simultaneously intimate and unreachable.

Averill: The internet has created the most radical transformation in gossip since the invention of print. Social media platforms enable instantaneous, global gossip networks that operate outside traditional gatekeepers. The phenomenon of “cancel culture” can be understood as digital gossip networks exercising unprecedented coordinated social sanctions. Unlike historical gossip, digital gossip leaves permanent traces, creating what Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier call the “eternal memory” of the internet.

Contemporary gossip is increasingly shaped by algorithms designed to maximize engagement. Platforms like Twitter and TikTok use recommendation systems that privilege controversial, emotion-inducing content—essentially optimizing for gossip. The result is what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism,” where our gossip becomes data commodity, and our tendency to gossip becomes the product being sold to advertisers.

Marissa: We currently face what some scholars call an “epistemic crisis” where the distinction between gossip, news, and information has largely collapsed. The concept of “fake news” essentially describes false gossip that has been weaponized for political purposes. QAnon and similar conspiracy movements demonstrate how gossip-like information sharing can create alternative reality systems resistant to factual correction.

Contemporary legal systems struggle to address digital gossip. Traditional defamation law, developed for print media, proves inadequate for viral social media posts. The European “right to be forgotten” represents one attempt to limit gossip’s digital permanence, while debates over content moderation essentially concern which gossip should be permitted on platforms.

Averill: Emerging technologies promise further transformations. Deepfakes threaten to make even video evidence of behavior unreliable, potentially returning us to a pre-modern state where all information about others is essentially unverifiable gossip. Conversely, blockchain technology promises “reputation systems” that could formalize and make transparent what has always been informal and opaque. Virtual and augmented reality platforms are creating new spaces for gossip. Meta’s Horizon Worlds and similar platforms must grapple with how to moderate gossip in immersive environments where the distinction between speech and action becomes blurred.

Marissa: From Mary Grout’s fatal gossip session in 1838 London to today’s viral TikTok rumors, we’ve traced gossip’s remarkable journey through Western history. What emerges is a story far more complex than simple “women’s chatter.” Gossip has been simultaneously dismissed as trivial feminine prattle and feared as a dangerous threat to social order—a contradiction that reveals deep anxieties about women’s voices and power.

In medieval villages, gossip networks enforced social norms and transmitted crucial knowledge about everything from childbirth to politics. The printing press transformed intimate whispers into mass propaganda, as we saw with the scandalous letters of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. The coffee houses of the Enlightenment and Victorian society pages created new venues for reputation-making and breaking, while the 20th century’s mass media democratized celebrity culture.

Today’s digital gossip operates at unprecedented speed and scale, blurring the lines between news, entertainment, and disinformation. Social media algorithms optimize for the very human tendencies that once made gossip essential for survival in small communities. Yet fundamental questions persist: Who gets to speak? Whose words are taken seriously? How do we balance free expression with protection from harm?

Perhaps most importantly, our journey reveals that gossip has never been merely about idle talk. It’s been about power—who has it, who doesn’t, and how information can challenge or reinforce existing hierarchies. As we navigate our hyper-connected age, understanding gossip’s gendered history reminds us that behind every rumor lies a deeper story about whose voices matter and whose truths get heard.

SHOW NOTES

D. A. 1683. The Whole Art of Converse : Containing Necessary Instructions for All Persons, of What Quality and Condition Soever : With the Characters of the Four Humours of the English and French, as to Their Way of Conversing. London: Printed for Joseph Hindmarsh … http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_val_fmt=&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:49595.

Capp, Bernard. 2004. When Gossips Meet : Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, UK.

Cowan, Alexander. 2008. “Gossip and Street Culture in Early Modern Venice.” Journal of Early Modern History 12 (3/4): 313–33. https://doi.org/10.1163/157006508X369901.

Daly, J. W. 1966. “Could Charles I Be Trusted? the Royalist Case, 1642-1646.” Journal of British Studies 6 (1): 23–44. https://doi.org/10.1086/385526.

Elias, Norbert. 2014. The Collected Works of Norbert Elias. Revised edition. Dublin: University College Dublin Press.

Foucault, Michel, and Colin Gordon. 1980. Power/Knowledge : Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. 1st American ed. New York: Pantheon Books.

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^[1] Dale Spender, 1986, Mothers of the Novel

^[2] Gowing, Domestic Dangers, p. 1

^[3] https://www.historyhit.com/innovations-in-propaganda-from-the-english-civil-war/

^[4] Anonymous, Gossiping Wife (Of all the wives that plague men’s lives) (ballad)

^[5] D. A. The Whole Art of Converse, 1683, p. 14, 37

^[6] Capp. 12

^[7] Henry Smith, Preparative, 1591.

^[8] Ruberg

^[9] Capp, 3.

^[10] Capp. p. 4

^[11] Capp, p. 63