Wauwatosa news. [volume] (Wauwatosa, Wis.) 1900-1948, 1907-10-26
The Nuisance Of the Habitual Gossip.

There never was a time since Sheri-
dan wrote his immortal school for
Scandal" when gossip was more the
order of the social day than at the pres
ent time.
Those quiet women are always the
worst. Depend upon it we don't know
all, whispers Mrs. Archer to friend
AZ a tea party. The very superiority and
flawlessness of that particular quiet wom-
an adds to the offense her neighbor
finds in her.
Presently she finds herself caught in
the cruel net of the woman gossip. And
for the very reason that there is no
foundation for the stories told of her,
denial and explanations are the more
diaicult
Mems lives used to be led more as
things apart from feminine existence.
Then they used to ''let the women fight
out the scandals and gossip among them
selves"
Nowadays the social lives of hoth
sexes are so intimate that the men fad
themselves drawn into the maelstrom Of
malice, whose chief force, it must be
confessed, is furnished by woman. First
they despise the smallness and spiteful-
ness of it all, then they endure and final
~ embrace the tenets of tittle-a-tattle.
And some of them, slowly, but surely,
degenerate into that meanest among the
products of civilization-the man gossip.
But it is the woman gossip who first
inoculates man with the virus of scan
dial. Once the germ of gossip becomes
firmly established in the human tempera-
ment, whether masculine or feminine,
like an ill-weed it grows apace. And the
habit of dlsparaging our neighbor and
his wife-especialy his wife--once ac-
quired, is as hard to overcome as is the
drink craze or the craving for morphia.
In the middle ages, those who were
suspected of being possessed of the devil
were subjected to fiagellation, fasting
and prayer to exercise the demon with
| IN. The woman gossip might undertake
similar regime on her own account.
For the possession of a tongue addicted
to SANDER is the worst form of demoniac
possession.
Few among us have the courage to
avoid the professional scandalmonger as
one would fly from a mad dog. Yet the
one is just as harmful to the community
as the other, though there are, of course,
varying degrees of the disease.
Rumors, like snowbals, gather as they
roll. And there is no truth whateyer--sO
far as scandal is concerned--in the
axiom that there is no smoke without
ire. For some types of woman gossip
are so imbued with the incendiary spirit
of scandal that they can raise a mighty
flare with the aid of only the woodwork,
of fiction.
The worst type of woman-gossip is she
who does her evil work deliberately. and
whose utterances as to her neighbor are
dictated by bad heart. She loves to
spoil things, and to act as a kill-joy The
worst gossips are women presumably
happily married and usually mothers of
several children.
The woman-gossip actuated by bad
heartedness is curious study There
must be some sort of morbid fungus
growth on the retina of her eye. for She
sees evil where no evil exists. She is as
keen to scent mischief as a hound to
sent fox, with the difference that the
| dog does not go off on false trail In
nine cases out of ten. the woman-gossip
| dOes-and she does not care. so long as
she can furnish raw material to those of
her kind, hungry to hear of somebody's
downfall or the breaking-up of a happy
| home.
In short the woman-gossip is such a
noxious person that when she happens to
be-as she usually is-a married woman,
| this fact should in itself serve as a salts
| factory and statutory cause for the
granting to her unfortunate husband of
decree of Philadelphia Even
ing Bulletin.