Europe has a long history of criticising or poking fun at how women talk and what they choose to discuss. Social sanctions meted out to so-called ‘gossips’ and ‘nags’ include ostracism and ridicule. Many countries also criminalised being a ‘scold’, punishing women with violence ranging from being dunked in water to being forced to wear a muzzle. But do women really gossip any more than men?
The dangers of women’s speech
Words by Christine Ro
- In pictures
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“A continual dripping on a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike,” reads Proverbs 27:15. Clearly the cliché of the annoying, argumentative woman has a long history. For example, this 17th-century etching personifies and genders the virtue of prudence: “Prudence, bee shee maide, or wife,/Hould shee her tounge, there is noe strife.”
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One quintessential way of describing such an argumentative woman is as a ‘shrew’. Despite being tiny, shrews have a strong presence. Unusually for mammals, these hyperactive, mole-like animals carry venom. They also tend to be aggressive for their size, and emit frequent high-pitched noises. These traits led to ‘shrew’ being used as a disparaging term for humans. While it was initially a gender-neutral insult, by the 14th century the term was being applied specifically to ill-tempered, garrulous women.
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In England in the 16th century, wives were sometimes categorised as either shrews or sheep. Though both might now seem unappealing, docile, sheep-like wives were celebrated over combative, shrew-like ones. The hectoring wife has long been a stock comic character, across different cultures’ storytelling traditions. Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ is just one of many variations of the common plot where a man vanquishes a woman’s sharp tongue.
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Indeed, classic English literature has been a key means of spreading the shrewish woman trope. In the incident in Edmund Spenser’s ‘The Faerie Queene’ shown here,“the hag did scold/And rayle at them with grudgefull discontent”. A character in Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘The Canterbury Tales’ warns, “chidying wyves maken men to flee/Out of hir owene houses”. Centuries later came Agatha Christie’s ‘Curtain’, where everyone sympathises with a possible attempted murderer because of his wife’s brutal nagging: “her tongue lashed every mistake her wretched husband made… I said with feeling: ‘I shall understand it if he ever takes a hatchet to her.’”
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The comedic exaggerations took a darker turn with fantasies of forcibly keeping women quiet. This etching from around 1826, captioned ‘Taming the Shrew’, shows a man sewing a woman’s mouth shut with a long thread. In some regions, force was actually enshrined in common law. Beginning in Britain in the 1500s, and then spreading outward, people could be punished for the crime of being a “common scold”. Though men were convicted on occasion, women were disproportionately found guilty.
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Some local magistrates sentenced scolds to wear scold’s bridles, inhumane iron masks that prevented speech. Another penalty was the ducking-stool treatment, where a scold would be dunked into water multiple times “in order to cool her immoderate heat”. Fines, gags and floggings were also administered. Public humiliation and spectacle were often a key part of the punishment. In England and Wales it remained illegal to be a common scold until 1967 (and in the US state of New Jersey until 1972), though at this point it was an archaism.
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Like ‘scold’, the words ’nag’ and ‘gossip’ also have gendered connotations. This print from around 1830 depicts two women so absorbed in their conversation that they inadvertently pour tea on a cat, much to the horror of a watching man. Men actually gossip just as much as women, and the idea that women talk more than men is a myth. Yet conversational analysis suggests gendered differences in how they gossip, with men being more likely to be self-promoting, and women more likely to incorporate lots of details and an engaging tone. Women’s informal speech about other people is often called ‘gossip’, while the male version is frequently referred to as ‘exchanging information’.
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In this engraving, emerging feminism is belittled and intelligent women brutally ‘reforged’. Where a query by a man might be viewed as a request, one by a woman is often coded as nagging. Some psychology research suggests that the stereotype of the nagging wife reflects differences in the ways boys and girls are taught how to express their wishes, as well as gender bias in the way communication styles are interpreted. And given women’s traditionally limited power in the outside world, they might feel the need to assert their competence in the domestic sphere – which the stereotype treats as a wife nagging her henpecked husband.
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Contemporary discussion around emotional labour, the invisible burden of which tends to rest on women’s shoulders, is one way of reframing the stereotype of nagging women. Whether women are represented as scolds, harridans, shrews or constant drops of rain, women’s speech has long been viewed as irritating, harmful or even criminal. But perhaps women’s advancing economic power is leading to a world where being prudent, quiet and meek will no longer be desirable. After all, Lindy West’s 2016 memoir became a bestseller. Its title? ‘Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman’.
About the author
Christine Ro
Christine Ro is a journalist whose work is collected at www.christinero.com.