“Gossips
are frogs, they drink and talk.”
Tudor men were
deeply suspicious of Tudor women. What they did and said, particularly behind
their husband’s backs, caused considerable concern and gave rise to a degree of
misogyny that permeated all aspects of popular culture. The dialogue exchanged
in the birth chamber, at the market place and in the tavern constituted a
supportive female culture, which was in turn, reduced to the status of damaging
gossip by men. After all, what else could Tudor women have to talk about except
the failings of their husbands ?
The rituals,
practices and superstitions of birth remained a traditional female preserve
throughout the Tudor period. This automatically made it suspect, a source of
fear and insecurity amongst those excluded from its secrets. Placed within the
wide-spread mistrust of women, childbirth highlighted the tensions that
permeated every aspect of women’s lives, although it provided one of the few
opportunities where female supremacy was grudgingly acknowledged. Irrepressibly,
women found outlets for expression and mutual reliance in those domestic
spheres that punctuated their days and life-cycles. That is not to suggest any
sort of proto-Feminist consciousness in Tudor England, rather a solidarity
forged through common experience or suffering. Women did band together to share
chores and objects such as nursing duties and childcare, childbed linen and
medicinal herbs, as well as emotional support. When some were mistreated by
their husbands, others stepped in to offer shelter and even physically
interposed themselves between husband and wife. Female identities were a
complex function of their relations with other adults, their children, the
church, the neighbourhood and its social codes. As such, there seems to have been
an almost floating, oral female culture invoked whenever occasion arose, in and
out of which women moved, dependent on need.
The childbirth
month was the epitome of male exclusion from the female sphere, involving
friends, relations and neighbours from the pregnancy stage through the
lying-in, to the subsequent ceremonies of upsitting, gossips’ feasts and
churching. In urban centre and larger networks of villages, birth would have
been a regular event, with its associated practices and perils forming a
backdrop to the lives of girls growing into adulthood. Birth could overturn
usual social demarcations between mistress and servant, nobility and yeomanry:
frequently ladies of the manor were present as a social courtesy, bringing
cordials, medicine and advice. The role of the gossips during lying-in and
labour were to cheer the mother and keep up her spirits, to distract her from
boredom and pain, whilst bringing whatever maternal wisdom they possessed from
experience and traditional wisdom.
Tudor women
were also denigrated in oral and printed forms of popular culture, where they
formed a very clear underclass as the subjects of jokes, fables and scorn.
Criticism about them, associating women with animals, appear in ballads, songs,
epigrams and pamphlets, identifying them with noisy, silly geese, deceitful and
insatiable cats, slippery eels, angry wasps and inflexible swine. It is clear
that not all women deplored this subjection: the reverse was also true; women
could be each other’s closet allies or their bitterest enemies, as the courts
attest. Some were active participants in the perpetuation of the worst female
stereotypes by making their enemies the targets of attack. Such cases arise in the
social disputes over sexual immorality and paternity which appear in Tudor Assize
court records when women are called to vouch for each others’ reputations or “common
fame”. Gossip was thus elevated to the level of legal evidence. Women did play
a part in this self-denigratory culture, by retelling stories, jokes and
anecdotes that reaffirmed their low status, perhaps as a way of distancing
themselves from the worst extremes of femininity, aligning themselves more with
male than female characteristics as a way of rejecting those stereotypes. It
was a form of self-protection in a society with a high level of permitted
patriarchal violence.
In the eyes of
the law, most Tudor women were powerless. Their social definition came through
marriage, yet ironically it was the spinsters and widows, the femme seul, who had most autonomy,
exercising control over their lands and goods and running their own businesses.
Providing they had the necessary funds though, these remained the minority. In
comparison, the married woman or femme
couvert was considered to be little more than an extension of her husband’s
possessions. Women did not even have control over their own bodies, with
husbands allowed to use physical “discipline” and rape wives without
repercussions. Religious debate continued to rage through the sixteenth century
as to whether women even possessed souls and any signs of intelligence were
repackaged as “cunning”. They were considered to have a particular talent for
being subversive: feminine intelligence was often presented proverbially as
deception: “women in mischief are wiser than men,”they were “necessary evils”
and were “made perfect by men.” The fear of female disobedience to male
authority was apparent in popular maxims: “a woman does that which is forbidden
her,” “women are always desirous of sovereignty” and “all women are ambitious
naturally.” A group of women was greatly to be feared, when they could share
ideas and plan ways to deceive their menfolk, as do the women in “Wives in the
Tavern.”
Male fears
concerning the malevolent power of collective female gossip could take
disturbing turns. “Scolds,” denounced by husbands, were fined or punished for
their inability to keep quiet and undermining of male authority. The grisly
metal bridles that survive in medieval castles and dungeons were illegal by this
time but the ducking of women in ponds survived into the 1560s, although rare.
It provided an opportunity for a man to reassert his dominance and regain a
little social credence in the public eye. One court roll of High Roding in the
early Sixteenth century, requested the removal from the village of a woman
named Agnes for being a “common scold” and “disturber of the peace to the great
annoyance of her neighbours.” At Barking in 1581, the
wives of Edmund Body and Geoffrey Wood were reported as common scolds, as was Matilda Glascock of
Becontree in 1575,
although no punishment was recorded. Bald’s Leechbook, an early medieval
collection of recipes, contained a cure for men against a woman’s chatter. The
advice was to eat a radish at night whilst fasting and one the next day, to
ensure the chatter cannot harm you, suggesting a real belief in the possibility
of tangible harm being done through speech to a man’s reputation. The potential
overlap of female disobedience, secrecy and witchcraft becomes even more
apparent in the pseudo-religious advice of receipt books and almanacs. Men
might make a salve against women with whom the devil copulated, using hops,
wormwood, lupin, vervain, garlic, fennel and other ingredients. They should
place these in a vat under an altar, sing nine masses over it, boil it in
butter and sheep’s grease, add holy salt and strain the liquid through a cloth
into running water. The man who anointed himself with this salve would be saved
from evil temptation.
Tudor misogyny
was exacerbated by the difference between the lives of men and women. Given the
constant threat of death and disease, poor medical understanding of female
conditions, the rigours of childbirth, child rearing and infant mortality,
coupled with the similarity of daily experience, it is little wonder that women
sought each other’s help and support. Without the modern labour saving devices
and opportunities that later transformed domestic duties, greater amounts of
women’s time were spent in regular social activities. Networks of women came
together at female-dominated locations such as the market place, dairy,
bake-house, laundry and in childbed, churching and christenings. Through their
work routine and life-cycle events, an oral female culture flourished, giving
rise to male suspicion about subversive gossip. Men feared the contents of
their wives discussions, believing them obsessed with their husbands’ sexual
performance and constantly critical of their behaviour; husbands would complain
of wives deliberately broadcasting arguments to draw in female neighbours. In
their absence, though, women could supposedly enjoy unregulated freedom of
speech, abandoning decorum and good taste when the boundaries came down.
Undoubtedly,
then as now, when a group of women talked together, men might be discussed, but
male fears about the dominance of women suggests insecurity and arrogance. What
else could their wives find to talk about but the men ? No doubt they were
comparing notes, broadcasting men’s misdeeds and performances. The doggerel
poem “Tittle-Tattle, Or, the Several Branches of Gossiping,” was a satire on
women’s idle and continuous chatter, although it also highlighted the regular
formation of female groups at the moments of key events and rites of passage. Women
were an unruly force that men had to tolerate for their role in essential
social ritual such as childbirth.
Nor did the
association of female gossip and defamation end with the Tudor period. In fact,
it has remained a feature of gender division until the present day, although
the potential harm of “gossip” has undergone a shift with the advent of
differing forms of media. Well into the seventeenth century though, gossips
were still targeted as manifestations of masculine fears; in a 1674 ballad “The
Gossip’s Meeting,” a man overhears women in a tavern criticising their
husband’s sexual prowess:
“My husband doth sit like a Mome (mummy?) all the
day
And at night in the bed he is cold as the clay
I would rather he would go and drink a pot or two
And come home and night and do what he should do.”
As if this was
not enough to stir up trouble, they plan to deceive their husbands and use
their pregnancies to explain their absence from home:
“Pretending our Burthens hath tired us sore
As if we were ready to fall on the flore
And so by that means they will patient remain
And pitty us too, when they hear us complain.”
Such
depictions, typically by male authors, exploit and fan masculine suspicions of
women’s rapacious sexuality, allowing them to uphold the common stereotypes
with some sense of justification, according to this “evidence” from the mouths
of fictional characters. The women’s manipulation of their pregnant condition
in order to deceive, emasculates their husbands and equates childbearing with
familial disharmony.
Many common
elements to women’s lives excluded men, not least their domestic space, work
and bodily experiences. Female spaces within houses were demarcated by gendered
roles, by the routines and tasks of the average day. Their work of cleaning,
washing, cooking, caring and nursing, created small safe pockets of personal
space within the wider male preserve of the household; female self-definition
was enhanced through the creation of locations and tasks from which men were
barred. The derogatory term “cotquean” was applied to a man who meddled in women’s
domestic concerns but certain females were also excluded: not even high status could fully assimilate a
childless woman into the rituals of motherhood, although women of all ages and
experiences participated in the sharing of domestic objects, clothing, linen
and knowledge.
Many tensions existed between Tudor men
and women, exacerbated by an imperfect understanding of each other. The
polarised expectations of their lives contributed to this, by excluding males
from key areas which created suspicion. This was apparent in many areas of
popular and legal culture, which was used by both men and women to perpetuate
these stereotypes. Yet in a pre-Feminist world, little sense of organised
female solidarity existed; men were essential to women and vice versa. Whilst many
women shared their experiences and resources, many others opposed each other
within this tradition. By the end of the sixteenth century, the rule of
Elizabeth would go some way to challenging these ideas but women would have to
wait many hundreds of years before any sense of female equality and rights
began to emerge.
