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Tea and women, c.1650-1914
Even by the end of the C17th tea was strongly gendered. I am interested to explore the ways in which women used the materiality of tea to combat negative views of femininity and how the association developed in the C19th.
Tea was first introduced to England in the mid seventeenth century, as a luxurious, expensive novelty. It was far from clear that it – or the other two hot beverages introduced around the same time: coffee and chocolate – would become popular. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century it was being termed a necessity to the working classes, and by the nineteenth century it had become symbolic of Englishness.
Even by the 1690s tea was associated with women, and through this with scandal, gossip, idleness and the general decline of society. I argue that women appropriated the material culture of the tea ceremony in order to combat negative views of women and promote the concept of feminine virtue conquering and civilising uncouth man. In doing so they also spurred on manufacturers and sellers, leading to an increase in the material culture associated with tea, all of which required using in defined ways. Control of the tea table became synonymous with gentility, and tea is often used in contemporary satires as a means to indicate the supposed refinement of the characters being depicted. In the nineteenth century, a period in which the cost of tea dropped, making it truly the drink of the masses, women were able to use tea as part of the feminine toolkit, using it and its associated materiality and rituals in the forging and maintaining of group identity in an explicitly gendered context.