Founding Mothers & Fathers by Mary Beth Norton

Author:Mary Beth Norton [Norton, Mary Beth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76076-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1996-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

SEXUAL GOSSIP

Sexual talk played a major part in the small politics of the neighborhood. A gossiper, especially one who discussed sexual matters, claimed to know secrets hidden from most people. Knowledge of sexual wrongdoing could accordingly convey power—the power to talk or not to talk, the power to decide whether, when, and to whom to reveal one’s knowledge. Since nearly all sexual encounters involved two or more participants and often witnesses as well, it was difficult if not impossible to prevent such tales from circulating through the neighborhoods. Either or both parties had only to tell a friend or two, or a witness had only to report what he or she had seen or heard, and the story would thereafter spread rapidly, perhaps eventually reaching the ears of the authorities. Even if the scandal were wholly fabricated, as some slanders surely were, adding a few plausible details could help to provide necessary credibility and encourage the tale’s dispersion. One such detail seems to have been attributing sexual scandals to women, even when those women denied having been the source of the gossip.49

Judging by the descriptions of gossip that survive in court records, everyone was interested in talking about sex. Titillating scandals found an eager audience of listeners, who then might turn into gossipers themselves as they spread the tales or insults even further. The subjects of the talk could only hope that lawsuits, prosecutions, or persuasion would stop the wagging tongues, in time either to preserve their reputations or to prevent their own prosecutions on sexual charges. Surviving court records reveal an intimate and intricate connection among the triad of neighborhood gossip, sexual offenses, and formal criminal charges, so targets were quite properly worried when such stories circulated about them. Few sexual offenders were as fortunate as Mary Taylor and George Catchmey, whose adultery was concealed from local officials by at least twelve knowledgeable witnesses (eight men, four women) before the thirteenth, Mistress Ann Johnson, revealed the truth.50

The types of sexual slanders spread by gossip networks ranged widely in nature. Some were blunt and straightforward: a Marylander “had got one of his Negroes with Child” and “had a black bastard in Virginia”; an Ipswich man “had three or four bastards at Road eyland;” two young Plymouth women “were withchild;” a third “is as very a strumpett as any in New England.”51 Others were indirect: a prominent Virginian’s mother “was a middwife not to the honorable citizens but to bye blowes.” Still others arose from innuendo-filled jokes: a New Haven resident reported to several men that he “heard Edmund Dorman at prayer in a swampe for a wife, & being asked who the person was … he answered that … it may be his mare that God would make her serviceable.”52

Evidence occasionally reveals how gossip began: with an overheard but misunderstood remark, with a shouted jest, with returning travelers who eagerly reported stories they had heard elsewhere about their neighbors. So in late 1655 Mistress Mary Bradnox came home to Maryland

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