Professor Silvia Federici reminds us that gossip originally meant god-parent. It was a positive term, suggesting a close, emotional bond. But in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, gossip became a negative, reason enough for murder. She writes, “In 1547, ‘a proclamation was issued forbidding women to meet together to babble and talk’ and ordering husbands to ‘keep their wives in their houses.’ ” Professor Maria Tatar elaborates in The Heroine with 1,001 Faces, “What is gossip’s greatest sin? One possibility is that gossip knits women together to create networks of social interactions
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