The Power of Women’s Words in Puritan New England: Gossip, Rumor, and Reputation in a Culture of Surveillance

This project interrogates the role of gossip and rumor in seventeenth-century New England. It focuses on words spoken either by or about women as a way to understand both the gendered nature of reputation and the ways in which women’s words shaped a politics of knowledge in early New England. It asks how reputation reflected and defined boundaries of the community and shows that women participated actively in defining Puritan religious culture. This project mines not only the content of rumors but also the networks through which it spread. This approach uncovers the ways that women’s networks constituted alternate sites of community definition and how different kinds of information and modes of transmission were gendered as either “gossip” or “news.”