Gossip Girls
"Silvia Federici has been one of the most influential and widely cited Marxist feminist scholars of the last 50 years. Her landmark work, Caliban and the Witch, argued that witch hunts were an organized campaign of mass murder of women who defied the increasing implementation of a patriarchal, authoritarian order under a rapidly developing capitalist state. In this article, Emily Janakiram argues that her work, and particularly her essay “On the Meaning of Gossip” can help shed light on a much maligned yet invaluable part of solidarity among workers and "women. . ."
"In her landmark Caliban and the Witch, Marxist scholar Silvia Federici argues that witch hunts were an organized campaign of mass murder of women–particularly low-class women, midwives, or “wise women”–who defied the increasing implementation of a patriarchal, authoritarian order under a rapidly developing capitalist state. Those familiar with it will perhaps not encounter anything too earth-shattering in her new essay collection, Witches, Witch Hunting and Women, but is an extremely timely and useful distillation of her most important texts, with great significance for working-class feminist movements today.
During the late Middle Ages, the development of market-oriented agriculture required a continually replenished, easily exploitable labor pool (a need compounded by the depopulation caused by the Black Death). In England, this took the form of land enclosures, which consolidated small farms and public land (the commons) into property of the rentier, who had sole rights to its produce. Thus, it was necessary that the vast majority of the population be dependent on a wage for survival; and similarly, it was necessary that a woman be dependent on her husband to perform the unwaged labor of social reproduction within the home.
The ensuing poverty and precarity was dealt in double measure upon women, who were increasingly excluded from the guilds and most professions, their ability to survive independently of men being severely curtailed by the privatization of the commons (In Caliban, Federici terms this the “patriarchy of the wage.”). This, along with rising prices of food and other necessities, led to the appearance of a largely female underclass. Older women who were either unmarried or widowed, without children willing or able to support them, bore the brunt of this deprivation. In turn, begging, itinerancy, and vagrancy were criminalized, giving rise to a forerunner of the modern prison, the poorhouse or debtor’s prison. The figure of the Witch, and the barbarity of the witch-hunts, emerged as a way to police women and their potentially subversive activities, from the refusal to pay rents and taxes, to exercising reproductive control, to simple theft. The Witches’ Sabbath, figuring prominently in art and literature from the period, held a particular horror. As Federici argues in Caliban: “Class revolt, together with sexual transgression, was a central element in the descriptions of the Sabbat, which was portrayed both as a monstrous sexual orgy and as a subversive political gathering…with the devil instructing the witches to rebel against their masters (177).”
Womanhood was essentialized as a capricious, demonic, destructive force visited upon society by Eve, and by women, her descendants; and it was incumbent on men to restrain it and channel it towards childbirth, child-rearing, and social reproduction generally. This involved a number of ideological, political, and religious interventions.
THE GOSSIP
Federici richly describes a number of these interventions—taken together, they form the basis of “patriarchy” as we understand it today. In her essay “On the Meaning of Gossip,” Federci traces the history of the highly gendered concept of “gossip”, arguing that originally, the word was a neutral-leaning-positive term for a woman’s female companions: “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.”This was reflected in the ways women conducted their daily lives”:
…neither in rural nor urban areas were women dependent on men for their survival; they had their own activities and shared much of their lives and work with other women. Women cooperated with each other in every aspect of their life. They sewed, washed their clothes, and gave birth surrounded by other women, with men rigorously excluded. Their legal status reflected this greater autonomy.
However, with the transition to capitalism, gossip—or solidarity among women—came under fire. From a benignly positive term denoting a woman’s female friends, gossip took on the meaning we know today—idle, wicked, bitchy women frittering away the hours in idle, wicked, bitchy talk. Women were discouraged from having female friends, for fear that this would undermine the husband’s authority in the family; and obedience to the husband was paramount. Indeed, this era saw the development of a number of peculiar and brutal punishments for women who disobeyed their husbands, most notably the infamous “scold’s bridle”—also called the “gossip’s bridle”, signifying the shift in the term’s connotations—a contraption made of metal and leather which enclosed a quarrelsome woman’s head and placed in her mouth a spiked bridle, which would tear her tongue if she attempted to speak or move her head.
These cruelties were most widely inflicted upon women who were perceived as defying the social order, but were in reality those were made most precarious by it—poor women, prostitutes, women who participated in riots against the enclosures. Such women were most often accused of witchcraft. Federici describes an instrument called the “cucking” or “ducking” stool, a sort of chair to which these wayward women were tied and repeatedly dunked underwater. This was one of the least brutal measures by far, women charged with witchcraft were often imprisoned, tortured, raped, and hung or beheaded or drowned.Subservience to the patriarchal order went hand in hand with subservience to the new capitalist state, and a transgression against one was tantamount to a transgression against to the other.
Neoliberalism, the New Enclosures
This history has a particular significance for today’s political and social climate, where an unprecedented public show of solidarity among women in the form of #MeToo has coincided with a wave of strikes and labor organizing, the likes of which have been since the 1970s. Led mostly by women in occupations rife with low-wages, exploitation, and sexual harassment–agricultural workers, hospitality workers, teachers, nurses, service workers–these strikes underlined the necessity of joint feminist and anti-capitalist action. . ."
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