I have it on the highest authority (and I’m not talking about my husband) that men don’t gossip. They may confer with each other over open car bonnets, or when propping up the bar while the women folk natter about quantum physics, the crisis in the Middle East, or the price of nappies. But the men are having a discussion, the women – well the women are just gossiping.
In fact, I’ve just found in my reading of the book Mother Tongue by Jenni Nuttall, that there is some foundation for this distinction. In the Middle Ages, pregnancy and birth were almost exclusively female affairs (apart from the inception, obviously). A group of women would support the mother-to-be whilst she was having the baby and in the weeks that followed whilst she was ‘lying in’ and was confined to her room or apartment. (The wealthier the woman, the more prolonged this confinement could be – poorer women didn’t have the space or the luxury of time for much lying in. But, whatever your social class, a baby’s birth was still very much managed by the women around you).
After the lying in, a woman would go to church for – hopefully – thanksgiving for the birth of a healthy baby, and for purification. She would ask some of these women to be godmothers for the new baby or, in Old English, a godsip or godsibb – literally a god-relation. It is easy to see the slide in spelling towards calling a woman so chosen a gossip.
By the sixteenth century gossip was regularly applied to the women attending the birth and lying in. And if you are going to be stuck in a room with a bunch of other women, you are bound to chat about all and everything, from tips on breastfeeding the new-born, getting your figure back and avoiding getting pregnant again too quickly, to the shocking price of parsnips in the market, to world affairs.
It’s easy to see how the noun became a verb and gossip became a stereotype activity for all women given any opportunity to get together.
And why, despite the evidence of our eyes, men don’t gossip.
But that’s another story.
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