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“Tea First Hand”

Gender and Middle-Class Domesticity at the Tea Table

[N]ow that the good old custom of tea-making is considered unladylike, and the manufacture has been handed over to the servants, the great charm of that beverage has virtually departed.

Arthur K. Reade, Tea and Tea Drinking

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH CULTURE, TEA REPRESENTED a nexus of cultural values, offering fluidity across boundaries and, at the same time, a reaffirmation of those boundaries. Tea operated as a marker of national identity, as the domestication of tea helped to mediate the exotic elements of the empire and enabled individual men and women to participate in the construction of Englishness in their own domestic parlors. The link between empire and England was forged and continually renewed at English tea tables throughout the nation. While the Eastern origins of tea caused anxiety about the porousness of the boundaries of national identity, representations of tea in English culture offered multiple strategies to strengthen those boundaries and to redefine the British Empire in ways that mitigated the potential threat of consuming the world. Similarly, tea offered the possibility of creating a unified vision of Englishness that merged different socioeconomic categories yet identified that vision as embodying recognizably middle-class values.

Within this vision of middle-class Englishness, the rituals of preparing and serving tea emphasized the specific gender roles of the family unit. Beginning in the eighteenth century, representations of tea often carried associations of femininity, especially as the domestic tea table was opposed to the more masculine world of the coffeehouse. In nineteenth-century England, the rituals of the tea table increasingly focused attention on the role of the middle-class woman. A woman’s position at the tea table became a locus of traditional moral values and the emotional center of the middle-class household and thus was crucial to the construction of both feminine and masculine identity in English culture. Tea highlighted gender categories and marked the boundaries of men’s and women’s roles within the home. At the same time, however, this focus on the feminine did not exclude men from the everyday rehearsal of the domestic. Tea allowed for more-fluid interactions between men and women at the tea table, and the crucial work of performing middle-class domesticity required the cooperation of both men and women. As tea advertisements and histories suggest, the middle-class woman was central to the performance of domesticity at the tea table, but men played an equally essential role in guiding women’s hands at the tea table.

Within nineteenth-century middle-class capitalist patterns of production and consumption, the home usually represents a refuge from the public workplace and therefore becomes a place of pure consumption and leisure. Higher incomes, the labor of servants, and the ideological ideal of a private sphere shielded from the world of work gradually reduced middle-class women’s workloads within English households over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But as scholars have argued, creating a space of leisure consumption requires labor, by women and servants, to both produce this space and enable the consumption occurring within it.¹ My analysis of the role of tea drinking in nineteenth-century culture reveals that the rituals of the tea table mark one of the few events in which women’s labor—not simply the results of that labor, but the actual dynamic sequences of tasks—was made visible and received praise. The authors of nineteenth-century novels, tea histories, and advertisements emphasized the importance of a woman’s active participation in tea-drinking rituals; they did not simply accept a woman’s location behind the tea table as a static display of virtue but instead insisted on the specific, crucial occupations of the tea table that had to be accomplished for the benefit of the family, the middle class, and the nation.

The Role of the Female Tea Maker

The symbolic power of a woman’s role in providing moral and physical sustenance for the family, creating the intimate family relationships that provided the foundation for domestic ideology, can be seen in tea histories’ emphasis on a woman’s direct involvement in preparing and serving tea. The woman of the household—either a wife and mother or a grown daughter—was the only person authorized to mediate between the preparation of tea and its consumption by family members. Nineteenth-century histories insist on a woman’s direct contact with the tea her family drank, and they stipulate that servants should not be allowed to usurp her role as tea maker. The anonymous author of The History of the Tea Plant (1820) admonishes, “Ladies in particular should not trust to the judgment of their servants in making tea.”² Relying on the connotative power of “trust” and “judgment,” the author of this treatise suggests that making tea was a grave responsibility in the middle-class family and emphasizes that the stability and happiness of that family depended on a woman’s active undertaking of her role at the tea table. The judgment of servants, The History of the Tea Plant implies, was flawed and perhaps even harmful to the members of the middle-class family they served. The role of preparing tea for her family had been entrusted to the wife and mother, and fulfilling that responsibility meant continuing to perform the tasks of making tea herself.