A Little Gossip Is Good for Civilization
By: Lisa M. Hayes for Confluence Daily
I am suspicious of people who claim they never gossip.
Not because I believe everyone is secretly malicious, but because I cannot imagine moving through the world with absolutely no curiosity about what other people are doing, who they’re doing it with, and why they made such an astonishing decision in the first place.
I enjoy a good story. I enjoy knowing things. I especially enjoy the sort of conversation that begins with someone leaning across the table and saying, “Now, you didn’t hear this from me.”
Apparently, this makes me morally questionable.
I can live with that.
What interests me is how we came to regard talking about other people as a character flaw, particularly when women are the ones doing the talking.
The word gossip comes from the Old English godsibb, referring to a godparent or someone bound by a spiritual kinship. Over time, the word became associated with close companions, particularly women who gathered around childbirth.
These women were part of an intimate social network. They attended births, supported mothers, witnessed significant events, and shared information about their communities.
Eventually, the word that once described a relationship became a description of conversation, and then a distinctly unflattering one.
I find that evolution fascinating.
For much of history, women were excluded from formal institutions of authority. They had limited access to political power, property, education, and the places where public decisions were made. Yet women still needed to understand the communities in which they lived.
They needed to know which men were dangerous, which families could be trusted, whose husband was drinking away the household income, which midwife was competent, which employer was dishonest, and who might help when something went terribly wrong.
Information traveled through friendships, kitchens, markets, letters, and conversations between women.
Sometimes it was trivial. Sometimes it was unkind. Sometimes it was inaccurate.
Sometimes it was the difference between walking into a dangerous situation and knowing enough to avoid it.
There is a reason information is valuable to powerful people. Knowing something another person doesn’t know can change the balance of power in a room.
We tend to recognize this when the information is circulating among politicians, executives, journalists, or intelligence officers. We call it networking, due diligence, intelligence gathering, or being well-connected.
When women exchange information about the people who inhabit their lives, we are more inclined to call it gossip.
Of course, the distinction isn’t always that simple. Gossip can be cruel, and powerful people gossip too. There are plenty of situations in which a whispered story becomes a weapon, particularly when the people being discussed have little power to defend themselves.
I have no interest in rehabilitating cruelty.
But there is an enormous difference between inventing a story to damage someone’s reputation and telling your friend that the charming man she has just met has a rather alarming history with his former partners.
One is malice. The other may be useful intelligence.
Researchers have even studied what they call prosocial gossip, the sharing of information about someone’s harmful or exploitative behavior to protect other people. In experimental research, this kind of information sharing has been shown to encourage cooperation and discourage selfishness.
Apparently, civilization sometimes benefits from someone quietly telling someone else what happened.
There’s also something wonderful about the social intimacy of gossip.
The conspiratorial lowering of a voice. The raised eyebrow. The collective reconstruction of an event that absolutely nobody at the table witnessed in quite the same way.
At its best, gossip is part of how people make sense of the complicated business of living among other people.
We compare observations. We test interpretations. We discover that the thing we thought was an isolated experience has happened to five other women.
We laugh about human absurdity, including our own.
Sometimes we learn that we were wrong about someone. Sometimes we realize that someone deserves considerably more compassion than we’ve been giving them.
Not every conversation about another person needs to become a moral indictment.
I also think there’s something worth examining in the expectation that good women should remain discreet, agreeable, and unwilling to discuss anything potentially uncomfortable.
Discretion is a virtue when it protects someone’s vulnerability. It becomes something rather different when it protects misconduct from scrutiny.
There are secrets that deserve to be kept, and there are secrets whose only purpose is to keep other people ignorant.
Knowing the difference requires judgment.
So, yes, I believe in being careful with information. I believe in checking facts, respecting confidences, and remembering that a human being exists on the other side of every entertaining story.
I also believe in long lunches with fascinating women who know things.
I believe in the social pleasure of a story well told, the education available through other people’s experiences, and the occasional necessity of saying, “Darling, there’s something you should know.”
Perhaps the problem was never that women talked too much.
Perhaps the problem was that women were talking to each other.
And sometimes, they knew exactly what they were talking about.
Lisa Hayes is a life coach, writer, and editor of Confluence Daily, specializing in social issues, political issues, and mental health. Her work has appeared in publications like Huffington Post and Real Simple. She is also the Communications Director for a local fire department in Mexico and runs a life coach training program called The Coaching Guild.
