‘A Movable Feast’: Negotiating gender at the middle class tea-table in eighteenth and nineteenth century England.

Paper to be given at Food and Drink In Archaeology 2008: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Nottingham University, 11-12 April 2008.
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Abstract:
When first introduced to English society in the mid seventeenth century, tea-drinking was viewed as an elite frivolity. Yet a century later it was drunk widely even at the lowest social levels in England and in the years following the wars of the early nineteenth century it successfully carved out a fundamental place in the English social landscape. Associated with femininity and the domestic realm from its earliest incarnations, tea acquired a collection of material ‘necessities’ which make it highly visible in the archaeological record. However, although its associated material culture is regularly used in interpretations of historical sites, archaeologically-informed discussions of the development of ‘tea’ as a term for a specific set of actions are rare. This paper will address one aspect of tea-drinking and will consider the role of the material world of tea in the negotiation and exploration of gender roles as Enlightenment turned to industrialisation, and the Victorian mistress was born.

Drawing upon written and visual documentary sources as well as material data from museum collection, this paper will consider the way in which women appropriated the objects associated with the tea table to challenge conceptions of femininity and retain control of social situations and how far this was successful. It will elucidate the role of tea things as active agents of change; in this case from the explicitly engendered tea ceremony to the apparently familial afternoon tea.