In this special Women’s History Month episode, Stefanie Schäfer discusses gossip with American Studies scholar Katrin Horn, head of the research project www.archivalgossip.com. Following the trajectories of American artists in Rome, and specifically the making of actress Charlotte Cushman’s celebrity persona, they read the functions of gossip in 19th-century US magazines between the intimate and the political, between escapism and nation building, and they also ponder the question of how gossip became gendered.
Last week, I had the pleasure of giving a guest lecture as part of the University of Münster’s Lecture Series In the Mood for Affect. The title of my lecture was “Capitalizing on Intimacy: The Rise of Gossip in US American Periodicals” and in preparing for it I re-discovered one issue of Ladies’ Home Journal that is so wonderfully bananas when it comes to gossip that a) I decided to dedicate an entire section of the lecture to this one magazine issue (the other two sections were focussed on the careers of Grace Greenwood and Anne Hampton Brewster and how they profitted off of their personal ties within the expatriate community in Italy, and on Town Topics‘ stylistic evocation of intimate familiarity among readers and between readers and “The Saunterer” respectively), and b) I wanted to share it with you here, too:
Let’s start with a bit of context: Simultaneous with the rise in public gossip for which I argue, the nineteenth century also witnessed another crucial and related trend in publications, namely etiquette manuals. As John Kasson summarizes in Civility & Rudeness, the interest in manners is intricately connected to changes in the social make-up, most centrally, the national focus on social mobility: “Fundamental to the popularity of manuals of etiquette was the conviction that proper manners and social respectability could be purchased and learned” (Kasson 43). Hence, it is unsurprising that the same magazines which might write about public figures and thus profit from the interest in gossip reports about their activities, might nonetheless also feature advice columns that warn against gossip’s potentially disastrous social consequences. So, I know that from a financial and editorial point of view it makes a lot of sense for the two opposing takes on gossip (condemning it / selling it) to exist side by side. Nonethelles, I was still struck by how that plays out in the August-issue of Ladies’ Home Journal from 1889 (full text accessible via HathiTrust).
That many people aren’t exactly fans of gossip (and haven’t been in the nineteenth century), isn’t new to me. That people felt strongly enough about it to put their disapproval into rhyme, however, is definitely a new insight! “Gadding and Gossip” by Georgia A. Peck, Good Housekeeping (Dec 29, 1888: 906) “They Say” by Richard S. Spofford, Harper’s Bazaar (Oct 31, 1885: 19)
