{"id":2363,"date":"2011-02-28T09:00:03","date_gmt":"2011-02-28T09:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/?p=2363"},"modified":"2011-02-28T09:00:03","modified_gmt":"2011-02-28T09:00:03","slug":"an-alphabet-of-femininism-20-t-is-for-tea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2011\/02\/28\/an-alphabet-of-femininism-20-t-is-for-tea\/","title":{"rendered":"An Alphabet of Feminism #20: T is for Tea"},"content":{"rendered":"
T<\/h6>\n

TEA<\/h2>\n

Make tea, child, said my kind mamma. Sit by me, love, and make tea.<\/p>\n

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa <\/strong>(1747)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ah, the Joke Post comes upon us at last. T is for ‘t’… very droll. I lift a cup to that. But fie! Have we learned nothing on this lexical journey?\u00a0First and foremost, tea <\/em>was not always pronounced as we currently say it: when it first appeared in English in 1601 it was\u00a0‘taaaaay<\/em>‘ and often written tay <\/em>(like the modern French th\u00e9<\/em>, a bit). It is not quite clear when and why the shift to ‘ti’ happened, but, then,\u00a0few things are as easy to lose sight of as pronunciation (how many people remember that Keats was a\u00a0Cockney?)<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

Shall I be mother? Catherine of Braganza, painted by Jacob Huysmans.<\/p><\/div>\n

Tea<\/em>, of course, has the additional complication that it is not an English word (although what is?) \u2013 it came from the Dutch thee<\/em>, in turn from Malay and, eventually, Chinese Amoy dialect: t’e<\/em>, or the Mandarin ch’a. <\/em>Woven into the geographical etymology, then, is a legacy of import history: around the mid-seventeenth century we\u00a0procured our tea from the Dutch, who imported it from Malaysia and, ultimately, China. What exactly were they importing? Why, tea<\/em>‘s first definition, of course: ‘the leaves of the tea-plant, usually in a dried and prepared state for making the drink’. In this form, tea<\/em> began with a queen, and quickly became every eighteenth-century Cosmo girl’s first route of seduction.<\/p>\n

Brew and Thunder.<\/h3>\n

But first – the drink. ‘Made by infusing these leaves in boiling water, having a somewhat bitter and aromatic flavour, and acting as a moderate stimulant’ – in this sense, the word tea <\/em>is first recorded around 1601, so some trendsetters must have been aware of it before the widespread importing of the later seventeenth century, when\u00a0tea <\/em>really came into its own: Samuel Pepys tried it in 1660, and a couple of years later it found a celebrity backer in the be-farthingaled<\/a> shape of the Portuguese queen consort to Charles II, Catherine of Braganza (remember her<\/a>?). So, in England at least, tea <\/em>was from the beginning tending towards the female of the species.<\/p>\n

Catherine’s tea-drinking was partly to do with Portugal’s colonial links with Asia, but also with her temperament<\/a>: solemn and pious, she initially had trouble fitting into the Protestant English court\u00a0and her preference for a ‘moderate stimulant’ over the ales and beers otherwise drunk marked one of many departures. But\u00a0tea <\/em>was quickly owning its stimulating qualities and being marketed as a ‘tonic’,\u00a0a civilized alternative to alcohol capable of soothing aches’n’pains and spurring on mental capacities: a zeitgeist for the intellectual impetus of the early Enlightenment – as against Charles II’s\u00a0well-known debauchery<\/a> – and,\u00a0in fact, a ‘panacea<\/a>‘:<\/p>\n

Hail, Queen of Plants, Pride of Elysian <\/strong>Bow’rs!
\nHow shall we speak thy complicated Powr’s?
\nThou wondrous Panacea<\/strong>, to asswage
\nThe Calentures of Youth’s fermenting rage,
\nAnd animate the freezing veins of age.<\/p>\n

Nahum Tate, from Panacea: A Poem Upon Tea <\/strong>(1700)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But what started out as a Portuguese import became a matter of English national identity, and by the next century London’s\u00a0East India Company <\/a>had established a monopoly on trade, controlling imports into Britain (and thus, prices), using its extensive trade links with Queen Catherine’s dowry \u2013then-Bombay \u2013 and the East Indies, and Asia. It was thus that the English turned not into a nation of coffee drinkers, but to devotees of the ‘Queen of Plants’. And a queen she certainly was, and not entirely distinct from the maternal and oft-secluded Queen Anne<\/a>, who dramatically reduced the size of the English court and inspired a new fashion for calm domesticity and politeness. Thus, the bustling male-dominated coffee-houses<\/a>, but also a more feminine fix at home…<\/p>\n

Five Leaves Left.<\/h3>\n

So in 1738\u00a0tea <\/em>came to mean not just some withered leaf, but also an opportunity for socialising! Hurrah! To be precise, tea <\/em>became ‘a meal or social entertainment at which tea is served; especially an ordinary afternoon or evening meal, at which the usual beverage is tea’. The fact that it could connote an ‘ordinary afternoon meal’ made tea <\/em>a convenient beverage to offer casual social callers, although it was also, of course, a beverage that demanded a whole host of conspicuous purchases: a full tea-set and the crucial Other Element \u2013 sugar. Thus your tea-table represented Britain’s colonial interests off in China and India to the tea-side, and Africa and the East Indies to the sugar-side, with all the attendant horrors of the emergent slave trade conveniently swept under the (Persian) rug.<\/p>\n

\"two<\/a>

Tea. Photo par Hodge.<\/p><\/div>\n

The\u00a0conspicuous\u00a0consumption tea <\/em>represented was exacerbated by its price:\u00a0before mass importation in the mid-century had driven costs down, the leaf itself was fixed at so extortionate a price (a bargain in 1680 was 30s a pound) as to necessitate the purchase of a lockable tea-chest, which would become the responsibility first of the lady of the house, and, when age-appropriate, of her daughter.\u00a0The woman who held the key to the tea-chest was, naturally, also the woman who made the tea – thus ‘Shall I be mother?’, a phrase of uncertain origin. One theory I came across was that it is a Victorian idiom related to the phenomenon of women unable to breastfeed naturally using teapot spouts to convey milk to their infant instead. OH THE SYMBOLISM.<\/p>\n

Whatever the phrase’s specific origins, it’s certainly true that from tea<\/em>‘s domestic beginnings\u00a0onwards whole family power structures could hang on which woman this ‘mother’ was. Alas, London’s major galleries forbid image reproduction (WAAH), but if you turn to your handouts<\/a>, \u00a0you will see this in action. This is the Tyers family: that’s Mr Tyers on the left, and his son just down from one of the universities. His daughter, on the far right, is about to be married (she’s putting her gloves on to go out – out of the door and out of the family). Her role as tea-maker has, in consequence, passed onto her younger sister, who now sits as squarely in the middle of the family portrait as she does in the family sphere. Conversely, in Clarissa<\/strong>, when the heroine\u00a0angers her parents they sack her from her tea-task and grotesquely divide it up among other family members (“My heart was up at my mouth. I did not know what to do with myself”, she recalls, distraught. I WANTED TO MAKE TEA!).<\/p>\n

And she feeds you tea and oranges…<\/h3>\n

Of course, while assigning the tea-making to your daughter could be a loving gesture of trust, it also pimped her marriageability: it requires a cool head and calm demeanour to remember five-plus milk’n’sugar preferences, judge the strength of the tea and pour it, all the while making small-talk and remaining attentive to your guests. Add to this the weighty responsibility of locking the tea away from thieving servants and you have the management skills of housewifery in miniature. It also showed off physical charms: poise, posture, the elegant turn of a wrist, a beautifully framed bosom. To take this momentarily out of the salon, no respectable punter would get down in an eighteenth-century brothel without first taking tea with the girls: Fanny Hill<\/a> <\/strong>spends at least as much time drinking tea as (That’s enough \u2013 Ed<\/em>), and, of course, this kind of performative tea-ritual femininity is a mainstay in the professional life of the Japanese geisha<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So, along with its identity as a colonial mainstay in Britain’s trading life, tea <\/em>in its origins is also something specifically feminine: a kind of Muse inspiring intellectual greatness, a Queen to be worshipped as a symbol of Britain’s health and power, and a key element in the women’s domestic lives. It could be stimulating, relaxing and seductive, but, as would become disastrously clear<\/a>, it was always political.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

NEXT WEEK: U is for Uterus<\/strong><\/p>\n