mythologies. In the Greek myths, we find the Graeae, three eerie spectral sisters, who lived in some indefinite realm beyond the space and time of the human world. The Graeae shared among them one eye, which they passed to one another at regular intervals. It was this eye that Perseus stole to use in his search for the Gorgons, a sister band of outcasts. The eye revealed the group and his special prey: Medusa, whose phallic snakey head he then chopped off and paraded as proof that the world was safe once more for men. (Medusa, of course, could turn any man to stone just by looking at him.)
Not so easily defeated were the Amazons, a ferocious band of warrior women who lived on a mysterious island, hidden from the world, where they practiced their “arts…. To draw the bow, to hurl the javelin.” According to Herodotus, each Amazon cut off a breast to make it easier for her to handle the weaponry. Eventually, Theseus, king of Athens, waged a severe, relentless battle and won their queen as his wife. Another select group of single women, the Muses, daughters of Zeus, watched over male lives. Each had the power to give to men specific artistic or intellectual gifts; they also possessed control over men’s imaginations, their ability to love and remember, although they could not directly affect a man’s destiny. That was left to the most feared female gang of all—the three Fates, those morbid shrouded beings who rolled out the string of life, stretched it, and raised the knife.
A mistrust of female communality turns some unexpected corners. Bronson Alcott summed up the patriarchal view when he said of Louisa, “She has involved herself with a group of women who are ridiculed and condescended to…. she [will be] tolerated as an eccentric…a faded woman…fit only for the fringes of family and social life.” But some early feminists objected, too. Mary Wollstonecraft, author of what would become the feminist constitution On the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), worried that women together were forming “unnatural organizations,” behaving without regard to the outside world, and thus developing a “grossness,” too great a degree of “intimacy,” among one another that would make it impossible for them to function as adult women the world would take seriously. Writer Eliza Lynn Linton, circa 1875, referred to shared group houses, or any too-close female organization, as “the shrieking sisterhoods.”
The sound of women talking together—gossiping, chattering, even whispering—seems always to have evoked negative images, shrieking or otherwise. Nathaniel Hawthorne complained famously of the many hack women writers, “damned scribblers,” as he called them, whose dreadful blathering books outsold his own. He often added to his usual tirade the secret belief that they worked somehow together, having masterminded a female word machine. “They speak endlessly to one another in private letters and they keep diaries which they are only too pleased to have others read out loud.” The Strand magazine, in 1894, only hinting at satire, called for the reinstatement of the brank, or gossip’s bridle, a sixteenth-century device that was, until 1824, used to “silence the talkative shrew.” The brank or branks consisted of an iron framework that locked like a helmet onto a woman’s head. Attached to the front was a small metal flap, or “gag,” that was inserted into the woman’s mouth so that she could not move her tongue. The bridle had extra features. The sharp gag was positioned so that if our shrew spoke at all, her tongue would be slashed.
The paranoid belief that women, when gathered in groups, will plot gossip, using words as Amazons used their weapons, is a recurring theme throughout history.
A fascinating document of this dread is a little-known 1916 antiabortion film called Where Are My Children? In this story, a small-town district attorney prosecuting a doctor for performing a deadly
Not so easily defeated were the Amazons, a ferocious band of warrior women who lived on a mysterious island, hidden from the world, where they practiced their “arts…. To draw the bow, to hurl the javelin.” According to Herodotus, each Amazon cut off a breast to make it easier for her to handle the weaponry. Eventually, Theseus, king of Athens, waged a severe, relentless battle and won their queen as his wife. Another select group of single women, the Muses, daughters of Zeus, watched over male lives. Each had the power to give to men specific artistic or intellectual gifts; they also possessed control over men’s imaginations, their ability to love and remember, although they could not directly affect a man’s destiny. That was left to the most feared female gang of all—the three Fates, those morbid shrouded beings who rolled out the string of life, stretched it, and raised the knife.
A mistrust of female communality turns some unexpected corners. Bronson Alcott summed up the patriarchal view when he said of Louisa, “She has involved herself with a group of women who are ridiculed and condescended to…. she [will be] tolerated as an eccentric…a faded woman…fit only for the fringes of family and social life.” But some early feminists objected, too. Mary Wollstonecraft, author of what would become the feminist constitution On the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), worried that women together were forming “unnatural organizations,” behaving without regard to the outside world, and thus developing a “grossness,” too great a degree of “intimacy,” among one another that would make it impossible for them to function as adult women the world would take seriously. Writer Eliza Lynn Linton, circa 1875, referred to shared group houses, or any too-close female organization, as “the shrieking sisterhoods.”
The sound of women talking together—gossiping, chattering, even whispering—seems always to have evoked negative images, shrieking or otherwise. Nathaniel Hawthorne complained famously of the many hack women writers, “damned scribblers,” as he called them, whose dreadful blathering books outsold his own. He often added to his usual tirade the secret belief that they worked somehow together, having masterminded a female word machine. “They speak endlessly to one another in private letters and they keep diaries which they are only too pleased to have others read out loud.” The Strand magazine, in 1894, only hinting at satire, called for the reinstatement of the brank, or gossip’s bridle, a sixteenth-century device that was, until 1824, used to “silence the talkative shrew.” The brank or branks consisted of an iron framework that locked like a helmet onto a woman’s head. Attached to the front was a small metal flap, or “gag,” that was inserted into the woman’s mouth so that she could not move her tongue. The bridle had extra features. The sharp gag was positioned so that if our shrew spoke at all, her tongue would be slashed.
The paranoid belief that women, when gathered in groups, will plot gossip, using words as Amazons used their weapons, is a recurring theme throughout history.
A fascinating document of this dread is a little-known 1916 antiabortion film called Where Are My Children? In this story, a small-town district attorney prosecuting a doctor for performing a deadly
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