When award-winning filmmaker and librettist Kimberly Reed went back – after a decade away – to her small Montana hometown, a hidden truth needed to come out. So her mother held a tea party.
In attendance were her mother’s friends from church, the arts community, and elsewhere. Gathered in the living room where Kimberly grew up, her mother acknowledged her friends all may have wondered what happened to the middle boy of her three sons. “I want you to know,” she said, “I have a daughter and her name is Kim. This is my child and I love my child. I hope you do too.” And then she asked them to share this news with others, trusting they would do so in a sensitive way, saying, “You are all my ambassadors.” Mother and daughter knew the phone lines would be buzzing all that evening. Kimberly and her mother invoked the often overlooked compassionate side of gossip to achieve what seemed too large to tackle alone.
Gossip is a word meant to mock the truths women tell each other about who they are and what they have gone through. It’s meant to keep us from telling our stories. The verb “gossip” began its life as the noun godsibb– a god-sibb- (“sibb” here meaning “kinship, relationship; love, friendship”) a term for women who were friends and confidants. This use of the word is at least 800 years old.
Here’s the backstory. Throughout human history, childbirth was entirely a woman’s domain. A laboring woman was attended by a midwife, if she was lucky, but also by her closest friends and her mother’s closest friends. Childbirth and the postpartum weeks afterwards were dangerous, when the new mother’s life wasn’t necessarily assured (About one in 15 pregnancies resulted in the mother’s death 800 years ago.) Women friends were not only there to help with childbirth, but also to keep the household going, since the work of carrying water and making meals and tending other children never stopped. These were her closest confidants, the people most privy to her secrets, the ones she trusted to raise her new baby if she didn’t survive to do so herself. In the poorest households women had precious little time to recover after giving birth, while the more fortunate had a lying-in time for the next few weeks with the help of other women. Once a new mother was back to her daily activities, the women who attended her birth and who helped her in those early weeks came to her churching, which University of Oxford professor Jenni Nuttall explains, was,
“… once a ceremony of purification which, by the mid-sixteenth century, the Church of England had cleverly rebranded as a service of thanksgiving. As well as celebrating her churching, a woman’s closest friends would be asked to become the baby’s godmothers. Godsib, literally ‘God relations.’ …Thanks to the stereotypical idea that women gathered together would do nothing but talk, we get our modern meaning of gossip with its gendered connotations. Eighteenth-century dictionaries defined a gossiping as ‘a merry meeting of gossips at a woman’s lying-in’ and a gossip as ‘one who runs about tattling like women at a lying in.’ I hope that the days post-partum were once as brimful of talk as these sexist definitions imply. Lying-in might have offered a chance to debrief and process memories of labor, a time for older gossips to tell their anecdotes and for younger ones to learn what might be in store later in life.”
There’s nothing objectively wrong with spreading news and interpersonal updates. Word-of-mouth was just about the only way to learn what was going on for eons, until the printed word was not only accessible but had a population literate enough to read it. That is, at least until radio broadcasts came along. (The world population only reached 50% literacy in 1950.) News quite naturally spreads among people who know each other. It can then spread to their outer circles and beyond, the way it is spread by news or social media today. The worst perceptions of gossip, that it’s negative or slanted or unconfirmed or damaging, can easily be said about not only social media but quite a few news outlets as well.
The negative aspects of gossip are well known, but very little of its positives.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard the term “gossip” applied to anyone who identifies as male. In fact, women are still poorly understood by science compared to men. (Science has long relied on males as the default subject in research. And now, under the current administration, studies specific to women’s health are being defunded and even hidden.) One example is how women don’t neatly fit into patterns assumed to be universal for humans, such as the behavioral response to stress being “fight, flight, or freeze.” Instead, women are likely to expand stress responses beyond that with a more advanced pattern of “tend and befriend.” This response includes reaching out to others, mutual aid, and strengthening relationships. Part of this may be, you guessed it, gossip. Studies show conversation between women reliably lowers stress levels, but gossip-type conversation also raises oxytocin– the neurotransmitter promoting trust, empathy, and bonding.
Gossiping has been around since ancient times. It is known to help bond people and reinforce norms. It can also bring about change. History shows the sharing of scandalous and disturbing information, person to person, group to group, can lead to significant social change. This includes the secret meetings of abolitionists and later suffragettes, as well as the real power amassed by 18th century hecklers. Sharing outrageous (true) stories has instigated major reform, from the meatpacking industry exposés by Upton Sinclair to long-overlooked revelations of children sexually abused by clergy. It’s probably a stretch to link any of this to talk between confidants, but that’s often what waters the roots of transformation.
I prefer conversations about ideas and insights. I especially like to hear people’s stories. Yes, like nearly every one of us, I sometimes engage in conversation about other people. Not to rumor-monger or insult, just out of curiosity. It seems intrinsic to being a human to wonder about each other, to ponder what it’s like to be in someone else’s situation, to parse out if a fellow human needs help or humor or, most likely, space to be themselves. And yes, I have been hurt badly by what other people have said about me, especially when it comes from people I care about. I have also been startled into abashed gratitude when told something kind someone else said about me. These experiences, common to nearly all of us, show how powerful gossip can be and why negative, untrue gossip can be so hurtful. That’s why I like the idea of reclaiming godsibb.
I think Rob Brezsny says it best:
My new fascination is the possibility of helping to establish a tradition of uplifting gossip, full of praise and gratitude. What about, if instead of naming the shadowy aspects of our friends and acquaintances behind their backs, we identified, celebrated, and propitiated their divine glory and shining wonder?
Vow: I name the most beautiful truths about everyone I meet.
Laura Grace Weldon 