Silvia Federici
Silvia Federici (1942–) is an Italian and American scholar, teacher, and activist. She is a professor emerita and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra University, where she was a social science professor, co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, and the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa.
Friendship
In early modern England the word ‘gossip’ referred to companions in childbirth not limited to the midwife. It also became a term for women friends [Mystery plays] were critical of strong, independent women, and especially of their relations to their husbands, to whom—the accusation went—they preferred their friends. As Thomas Wright reports in A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England during the Middle Ages (1862), they frequently depicted them as conducting a separate life, often “assembling with their ‘gossips’ in public taverns to drink and amuse themselves.”
From: Silvia Federici, ‘On the Meaning of Gossip‘,Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women, 2018