To Name a Gathering of Women

An ordinary day. We are gathered in the early hours, or at an interval of morning, or in the last pause of light before night arrives and calls for sleep. Some of us have walked, others have come from further by car or by bus, leaving home and work and other duties of the day for something that is ours alone. We arrive on our own or in twos and threes. We spill. We take up space. We make noise. We are here to move our bodies. In many moments, allowed or stolen, we share words, glances, gossip, laughs, looks of knowing, of whole lives translated in the uttering of a phrase. The stories of our bodies differ but converge here, in this room.

We have gathered for centuries. The record of our gathering is held in dictionaries of words given to name it. Coven. Gossip. Sorority. We have been nouns. We have been verbs. We have been spinsters, hags, harpies. Words that began as names for who we are or what we do became weapons held against the throat of our gathering. Some were made monstrous and sharpened into fear. Others were made small and trivial, softened into something to be outgrown, embarrassed by, left behind.

Historically, women gathering has been treated as a threat to society. These have been collective spaces where we learnt our own nature, came to feel who we were in the context of each other. Spaces where we held each other through every stage of life. We were there in the rooms we were born in. We were there at each bleed. And as death came for those we loved, and then for us, still we were there, gathered, ever-present. We fed, bathed, held, consoled.

In these rooms, wisdom passed from hand to hand, from mouth to ear, a collective knowledge created and transmitted, each telling adding to the evolving narrative, building a small power that was ours to know and carry. It is a power that cannot be contained, though it can be burnt.

What does it mean to name a gathering of women? To name is to define, to contain, to make known what is sensed. Names come to represent us, to stand in for us, to be held against us. The names given to women gathering have never been neutral; they have always carried an instruction.

Coven traces back to the Latin convenire, meaning "to come together" or "to agree”. It holds the same root as convene, convention, covenant. It originally referred to any kind of assembly, void of damning witchcraft associations, of darkness or danger. Those meanings came later, as language and gatherings became weaponised against women who gathered, who agreed, who came together outside the sight of men.

We have gossip from Old English godsibb: God plus sibb, meaning relative or kin. In Middle English this extended to mean a familiar acquaintance or friend, especially women invited to attend a birth. It was a word that marked close female friendship, that named the women gathered in the rooms where life began. Then, it was turned, deliberately and systematically, to mean idle talk, bitter chatter, the small unserious noise women make. In 1547, a proclamation was issued forbidding women to meet together to babble and talk, ordering husbands to keep their wives in their houses. The scold's bridle, a metal contraption enclosing the head with a muzzle that could pierce the tongue, was also called the gossip bridle. The conversation of women gathered together was not idle, not trivial. It was powerful enough to require a law, and an instrument of torture, to silence it.

So much of women's gathered knowledge was oral, passed body to body, never archived. What was burnt was not just women, it was all we knew and shared between us. Women’s gathering has always happened around the body: birth, bleeds, illness, menopause, grief. Gossips communed at the birth. Covens met at the threshold of life and death. And now, Bevy begins in a room of women moving.

The word Bevy, the name given to this new world we are creating, emerged in the early 15th century as a collective noun for quails (a flock, an assembly, a gathering) and simultaneously for women. Its origin is Anglo-French, bevée, which became in reference to drinking, to birds gathered at a pool or puddle. Its ultimate etymological root remains unknown or obscure, but is a word that has always named both birds and women, that carries water within it, that describes a gathering at a shared source.

Gatherings of women have long been spoken of in the language of birds: harpies with their unruly nature, hens with their clatter, quails symbolising objects of the hunt. Birds are creatures who flock instinctively, navigating by the earth's own field, carrying their songs with them across the world. What was meant to make us small or vilified only named what we, by nature, do. A return to the source. A finding of each other at the common water.

We are still here. The research into women's health is still catching up to what women's bodies have always known and passed between them. Our resources are still insufficient, our gaps still decades wide, our dismissals still all too familiar. But so is our gathering. We have never stopped arriving, on our own or in twos and threes, by foot, by car, by bus, leaving the day for something that is ours alone.

Bevy is a word nobody can fully explain. It names birds gathering at water. It names ladies. It names us. We chose Bevy for its sense of gathering at a shared source, drawn together by need and by nature and by the long knowledge that we are stronger here, in this room, together, than anywhere we have ever been alone.