11 - Gypsy women

Summary

In this chapter I shall discuss the extraordinary contrast between the outsider's stereotype of the Gypsy woman, and the ideal behaviour expected of her by the Gypsies themselves; the two are more closely connected than the conventional opposition between fact and fantasy, the real and the ideal. The relationship is reflected in the Travellers' beliefs in female pollution. This cannot be satisfactorily explained through the Travellers' internal organisation alone, but can be properly understood only when set in the context of the Travellers' external relations and of the more general pollution taboos between themselves and Gorgios.

Gorgio view of Gypsy women

Throughout Europe the Gypsy woman is presented as sensual, sexually provocative, and enticing. In England a stereotype of the Spanish Gypsy is often thought to be typical and is so depicted in popular paintings: a black-haired girl in décolletage, with flounced skirts and swaggering walk, hand on hip – every operatic Carmen walks this way. One of the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of Gypsy is, ‘term for a woman, as being cunning, deceitful, fickle, or the like … In more recent use merely playful, and applied esp. to a brunette.’ She is thought to be sexually available and promiscuous in her affections, although sexual consummation and prostitution are elusive in the image. Sometimes the suggestion is explicit: in the eighteenth century, Ellis, a farmer near the area where I later did fieldwork, referred to the local Gypsies as follows: ‘These miscreants and their loose women, for no doubt all of them are so, as they lie and herd together in a promiscuous manner … a parcel of Rogues and Trollops’ (Ellis 1956:78).