Women’s Tea Consumption

Despite the song at the beginning of this book, tea was not a particularly female drink. No data suggest that sex affected how much tea or coffee a colonist drank, and we have no reason, save perhaps present bias, to assume otherwise. Correlating tea with women risks buying into the gendered caricature. Tea was drunk socially. Both men and women both drank at tea parties and daily meals. It was served to visitors, shared with the household, and drunk alone. At all these times, men were as likely as women to have it.¹ In a household of means, the table would have a teapot and a coffee pot, and men and women drank from either.

As buyers and household managers, women controlled not just their personal consumption but household use generally. A woman, Pennsylvanian Sarah Mifflin explained, determined what was on her table and served to her family. Captain Chambers had planned to sell his tea to several women who entertained and managed large households in New York. Women were implied when Providence “Families” “discontinued” tea. The proposed December 1773 boycott agreement in South Carolina committed each signatory “him or herself” against “importing, buying, selling or using” tea, recognizing that women could be buyers, not just drinkers.²

Tea was prominent at female social events. In some colonies, drinking a cup with each of perhaps a dozen female well-wishers became part of the bride’s post-wedding obligations. Charles Beatty recommended tea to his soon-to-be-married sister because the female sociability involved with it would help her make friends in her new home: “If you have tea you will have visitors enough, you will see every old wife in the neighbourhood each week, you will hear all the news that is stirring.” More obviously, tea parties—in parlors, not harbors—were feminine affairs. But the existence of tea parties did not mean women drank more tea than men. Other drinks could be served (when Bedford, Rhode Island’s Daughters of Liberty resolved against tea, they served a tisane). Men attended tea parties too. Hannah Griffitts noted that both sexes took tea, one getting “Sense,” the other, “Politeness,” from it. Tea parties were sites of “domesticity and women’s sociability,” but this sociability included men. Tea parties were feminine because women had social authority there. Female control of the tea table left it open to accusations of domestic frivolity: “idle chatter,” gossip, and “tattle and chat,” but the presence of gossip hardly meant the absence of men.³

Tea was also an important component of male sociability. Men could drink tea at taverns, pubs, and coffee houses. William Caswell did just this at a Philadelphia tavern. These were predominantly male places, where men’s consumption did not necessarily have a female counterpart. Elihu Ashley’s diary reveals the importance of tea-drinking in his socializing with other men: reverends, merchants, clerks, militia officers, and fellow doctors. Taverns and coffeehouses served more than tea, of course, and Ashley as his friends socialized over other drinks, too, like coffee and flip, but tea remained an important part of this male social world.⁴

The tea table could also serve as a place for courtship, which required men. A suitor, such as the New York man who sought to have “a dish of tea with some one of my female acquaintance,” expected other women to be there. This reception was a chance for him to demonstrate gentility and refined conversation and for the women to evaluate him as a match. Ashley’s diary frequently recorded groups of several young men and young women taking tea together during his courtship days (coffee or alcohol was also sometimes served). Similar courtship rituals, with young men drinking tea “with an agreeable circle of young ladies,” occurred in Connecticut. The poem “A Lady’s Adieu to Her Tea-Table” describes a “spruce Coxcomb” suitor at the tea table. Tea could be a part of courtship in other venues, too. “[Y]oung ladies and gentlemen” from New York and New Jersey went about on sleighs after a snowfall. With four people per sleigh and perhaps a dozen sleighs at a time, these “parties of pleasure” rode out “to dine and drink tea”—and court—in January 1775. At Batchelor’s Hall, a venue north of Philadelphia on the Delaware River that served as a playground for the city’s wealthy youth, “maidens were inveigled and deceived,” as one moralist noted, at tea and dancing parties—hardly the stuff of women-only consumption.⁵

Teas served various social functions and men had various roles within them: suitors, family members, church members, neighbors, guests, and hosts. Pennsylvania diarist Hannah Callender Sansom noted “Daddy at tea” and “Daddy and John Thompson at tea” in 1772, as well as “tea at Unkle Robert Smiths.” Cousin Catherine “Smith and I drank tea at Neigh[bor] Warners.” New Yorker Samuel Seabury also offered tea to “my friendly neighbors when they come to see me.” “Besides,” he added, “I like a dish of tea too.” Sansom went to teas with fellow church members—she noted teas following Quaker meetings. Some were female-only: a tea with “Aunt Fisher” before a meeting or afterward with Betsey Waln, Becky Shoemaker, and Sukey Waln. But Sansom’s teas were not exclusively female. When, in September 1772, five women joined her for tea, she had “Daddy Sansom at tea,” too.⁶

Men and women discussed tea in their diaries and letters in different ways. Few noted daily tea consumption. Women were more likely to note occasions: coffee klatches, teas, and dinners that were social or family events. These were ways for women to see friends and relatives, markers of women’s lives and relationships. Household goods could be such markers, too. When Loyalists valued their estates for reimbursement from the British government after the war, men usually gave lump sums for home goods. Women, however, enumerated these items, implying a sentimental or personal value: a mahogany table, the tablecloth a sister had made, a tea service. This reflected how women, as homemakers, used and owned things. They gave cloth and household goods to other women in wills as gifts. These were products of their labor, heirlooms, holders of sentimental and economic value. For married sisters living apart, gathering for tea or coffee on their mother’s tablecloth was worthy of note in diaries in a way that men meeting their regular friends at the tavern and perhaps having tea was not.⁷

Thus, between the time when the Polly turned back from Philadelphia in December 1773 and the Association’s non-consumption order began in March 1775, Elizabeth Drinker recorded four outings where she “drank tea” with friends and family and four occasions when she drank coffee. The “family” “went to Frankford” and “had tea there,” she wrote in August 1774. Sometimes she listed the attendees by name: S. Emlen and wife, Nancy Potts, Sally Parish and daughter Debby Mitchel, and Samuel Plesents “drank coffee with us” in January 1775. Likewise, in South Carolina Eliza Lucas Pinckney noted social calls with Mrs. William Henry Drayton (two teas in February 1775) but did not note tea consumption generally.⁸ This meant that ordinary tea consumption went unnoted among the well-to-do and other social classes.

While Drinker and Pinckney noted tea’s social value, neither noted its political importance in their discussion of tea visits in 1774 and early 1775, even though both families were at the epicenter of tea politics. Elizabeth Drinker’s husband, Henry, and his partner, Abel James, were consignees for the Company tea on the Polly in 1773 and had endured political hardship for it. Elizabeth recorded teas with the Jameses but was silent about tea politics, perhaps because she did not accept the Association’s authority over her (she also noted having teas while the Association was in effect). Pinckney, by contrast, was a powerful, educated, and independent Patriotic woman, mother to two Patriot statesmen, who took tea with Drayton, wife to a Patriot leader. Pinckney did not say why she stopped having teas; perhaps it was too obvious. Some women mentioned the reason clearly. Sarah Mifflin, wife of Thomas Mifflin, a major Pennsylvania merchant and Patriot leader, noted in mid-1775 that she had “not drank” tea “since last Christmas” because “parties of pleasure, tea-drinking and finery” had been sacrificed to the “great spirit of patriotism.”⁹ But Sarah Mifflin was the exception. Most women’s diaries remained silent on the issue. For Pinckney and Drinker, the politics that affected their lives could go unstated in their diaries and letters.

Many male diarists and lettrists commented on tea drinking: John Andrews, John Adams, Nicholas Cresswell, Robert Honyman, Philip Vickers Fithian, George Washington, Landon Carter, and Charles Willson Peale. But they noted politically significant teas, not purely social or familial gatherings. Andrews joked that he had been drinking tea while listening to the Boston Tea Party. But presumably he had drunk tea on other occasions too banal to joke about; Adams opined that tea should be banned in July 1774. Did he note it because it was the first time he had tried to order tea since the Tea Party, or because he finally got a political response to his order? Cresswell documented the ban and Honyman and Fithian its violations, but they did not mention teas and coffees at other times when they lacked political significance. Carter mentioned a tea party celebrating the end of the tea boycott. Charles Willson Peale’s diary entry noting a dish of tea with his family simply as part of their travels was an exception, as was George Washington noting tea with Mrs. Roberdeau—wife of a prominent area Patriot.¹⁰ What the men omitted about tea was as significant as what they said: men were at Elizabeth Drinker’s teas, and men went to family gatherings where tea was served, even if they failed to mention it.

Women in Tea Politics

Politics was not just a man’s business. Women had been listening to political discussions at home for a decade. “Your husbands, your fathers, and all your dearest friends of the other sex, have no doubt frequently discussed, in your presence, this momentous point” of politics, wrote Virginia’s women to the “Ladies of Pennsylvania.” So women acted. They cooked for militia musters, made ammunition for the Powder Alarm, joined Patriotic mobs, and encouraged their men. Massachusetts women signed the Solemn League and Covenant. In Edenton, North Carolina, fifty-one women signed their support for their menfolk’s resolves. The tea protests discussed in earlier chapters likely included women. Women participated in Charleston’s Guy Fawkes Day parade and were part of the “numerous Concourse of People” who watched Robert Lindsay, Zephaniah Kingsley, and Robert Mackenzie toss their tea into Charleston harbor.¹¹

Women wrote about tea politics. One Daughter of Liberty, writing in to the Massachusetts Spy about the Company tea, urged men, “Don’t suffer any tea to land.” Tea would “enslave ourselves and Posterity” if women drank it, “A Planter’s Wife,” thought. Women had to “forego the Use of all Foreign Tea” and “East-India Goods” out of “Regard for our Country,” and for the sake of their “Fathers or Brethren, Husbands or Children” who would have to fight any war. For “A Planter’s Wife” this was because women, like men, drank tea, and since tea was now political, men’s and women’s tea drinking was political, too.¹²

Women organized against tea. In August 1774, an “ADVERTISEMENT to the LADIES” appeared in the South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal. It announced an upcoming “Meeting” of “a Number of respectable ladies” “to converse and agree upon some general Plan of Conduct with Respect to the Article of TEA.” Writing “To the LADIES of South Carolina” as “The HUSBAND of the PLANTER’S WIFE” (a deliberate inversion of who is married to whom), Reverend William Tennent III supported women’s anti-tea organizing: “Associate—resolve—burn your tea;—refuse to buy any more. Your country will rise and call you blessed,” and women will become “the Deliverers of their Country.” In Wilmington, North Carolina, women publicly burned their tea. The Daughters of Liberty in Bedford, Rhode Island, announced their resolve not to “use nor suffer to be used in their houses” dutied tea. They would “bid adieu to India stuff/ Before we’ll lose our liberty.” “We … Promise, from this day forth, to reject, and totally renounce” tea, the South Carolinian “Andromache” replied to A Planter’s Wife. “[F]riendly Visits” among women would spread the word of the tealess party, and she hoped women would canvass the town “to obtain the Assent of every Mistress of a family” to disuse tea.¹³

By mid-August 1774, the South Carolina Gazette reported that the town’s “Ladies” had formed an “Association, and are subscribing to it very fast.” The Association, reprinted in the South Carolina papers, aspired to “a total Disuse of East-India-Teas” to avoid the “Ruin” of “our Country” and to protect “the Lives of our Fathers” and “the Liberty of our Posterity.” Signers promised immediately not to “purchase or buy” any tea (women’s primary connection to tea) and, from November on, not to serve or drink it, “counting any little Self-Denial, we may meet with in our Adherence to these Resolutions, as our Pleasure and Glory in the Cause of our Country.”¹⁴

The tea boycott was a “watershed” in women’s political consciousness and engagement, and in the public recognition of women’s political role, particularly in Southern newspapers, where women’s political writing appeared for the first time (Daughters of Liberty had already sent items into northern newspapers earlier in the imperial crisis). Women engaged in an informed and “intelligent public discourse” in an otherwise-male medium. Women wrote to other women about women’s roles in politics.¹⁵

“A Planter’s Wife” had written to the South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal in July 1774, drawing Charleston women to tea politics and bringing on the townswomen’s boycott. Writing to her “Sisters and Countrywomen,” she argued that tea was a matter “chiefly” for “our sex” because women’s decisions whether to serve, boycott, or burn tea affected the whole household. “Every Mistress of a Family, may prohibit the Use of Tea and East-India Goods in her Family and among her Children.” This was an act of “Self-Denial, and public virtue” which “many respectable Families” in Charleston, led by their ladies, had already done. More needed to. This was not a time for women to “be tame Spectators.”¹⁶

“Andromache” replied. She thanked A Planter’s Wife for encouraging “Ladies of my Acquaintance” to “rouse from this shameful Stuper” and banish tea from their homes. The boycott was a “Test of our Obedience, our Love, and that Gratitude we owe” men. It required women be political. “I dare answer there will not be found among us, one EVE, who, after Promise … [would] touch the forbidden fruit,” bring “Infamy” on women, and doom the future. Nor would Charleston’s women be Jezebels who misled their husbands. They would be like Esther: the good and Godly wife who protected her husband and saved her people. Andromache had chosen her examples carefully. Eve, Jezebel, and Esther had power because they influenced men: to Andromache, women’s choices mattered because women made men’s minds for them. As went Eve, so went Adam. Jezebel’s man Ahab was “weak and wrong-headed,” and Charleston men were as easily led. As planter’s wives, Charleston ladies had a political role. Like Esther, they could whisper in their husbands’ ears or let the King’s ministers destroy their people instead.¹⁷

Some writers also began to refer, as A Planter’s Wife had, to “Countrywomen”—a term that placed women in the polity and evoked the more common “countrymen.” Virginia women wrote a “sisterly” open letter to their “countrywomen,” the “Ladies of Pennsylvania,” urging “public virtue” (a manly trait) to “banish India tea from your tables,” drink “aromatic herbs,” and “cooperate with” men in resisting Parliament. The “fair sex of … all America, will be so” “instrumental” in any “redress,” that history would be “filled with their praises, and teach posterity to venerate their virtues.” The Husband of the Planter’s Wife agreed, “Have you the Soul of Englishwomen?” If so, give up tea “for your Country”—not for their husbands’ country, but their own.¹⁸

Class, Women, and Tea

Such discourse confined the polity to the upper classes, leveraging conservative class norms to broaden the polity by gender. In this reading, politics was a matter for women who did not have to work, who had time and money for an education (implied in the classical name, “Andromache”), and whose menfolk were property owners (and may not have had to work either). A Planter’s Wife was not a cooper’s wife and most certainly not a slave or woman of color.¹⁹ Thus while writers used many terms: “sisters,” “fair sex,” and “your sex,” they constantly returned to “lady.” A Planter’s Wife addressed the town’s “ladies.” “A Lady’s Adieu to her Tea Table,” the poem “Written by a LADY, on receiving a handsome Set of TEA CHINA,” the “advertisement to the ladies” organizing an anti-tea meeting in Charleston—the term was ubiquitous. Andromache wrote of the “uncommon … Ease and Affluence,” of South Carolina ladies’ social calls, and of their travels in “Chariots.” Affluent women traveled in season between Charleston and country plantations with children, extended family, slaves, and servants and entertained a constant stream of visitors. When genteel women banned tea from their tables, they also chose not to serve it to dozens of others. In Pennsylvania, “ladies and gentlemen” referred to households of urban merchants and officials above the hoi polloi—merchant’s wives like Sarah Mifflin and Elizabeth Drinker, not cooper’s wives, either.²⁰ The calls to politics for elite women followed the same class norms as for elite men: planters in the Carolinas, Quakers and merchants in Philadelphia. Where ladies led, it was expected common women would follow.

There was a gap between talk of tea as an upper-class item and its generic reality. Tea and the tea table were associated with gentility and refinement. “A Lady’s Adieu to her Tea Table” recites the “gaudy attire” of the tea table, its chinaware and equipage, the “pretty” tea “chest that so lately did shine,” and the “spruce” guests. Affluent hosts displayed imported finery: mahogany tables, special cloths, and silver services. But alternatives existed for the middling sort: mahogany veneers, homespun cloths, and pewter services. The “Adieu” portrayed an upper-class ideal that may have existed more in colonists’ minds than in their daily lives. Housemaids drank tea as well as their ladies.²¹ Middling colonists commonly had tea at breakfast. Tea consumption had spread to people who might drink bohea in earthenware even as elites drank hyson in porcelain.

The association of tea with refinement gave tea a class and a gender. By focusing on the high consumerism of elite tea parties and ignoring the bulk of tea consumption among common people, Patriot propagandists disassociated tea from everyday life (in which it was unobtrusive). They associated it with luxury, idleness, and a lack of resolve—a caricature of weak-willed Tory elites. Thus Peter Thatcher, giving the first wartime Boston Massacre oration, could say the British had given in to “luxury which effeminates the mind and body” and exhort colonists to cling to their guns, their boycotts, and their manly virtue.²²

Gendering Tea

Gender was a key thrust of the Patriot propaganda campaign against tea. Patriots were genuinely concerned about the supposed female weakness for tea. Some women writers pushed back against this. Others—both men and women—wrote under female bylines to talk about the female effort to give up tea. These writers exhorted women to give up tea and emasculated the men who had not. But the exhortation not to drink tea was driven by a concern that women and men still did.

Tea became gendered in the eighteenth century through its association with women-run tea parties and home life, based on which some describe women as the main tea drinkers. Englishman Nicholas Cresswell thought Alexandria, Virginia’s “ladies seem very sad about” the “last day Tea is allowed to be drank on the Continent.” Connecticut Congressman Oliver Wolcott hoped “The Ladys” could “make themselves contented to live without Tea for the good of their Country,” and after Congress allowed tea explained that Congress had “permitted the Ladys to drink” it (for who else would?). Tea was a weakness and women, the weaker sex, gave in to it. Poetess Mercy Otis Warren pondered “weak” women asking why they should give up “female ornaments.” Such women considered the “finest muslins that fair India boasts, And the choice herbage from Chinesan coasts” their “sex’s due.” She imagined Boston’s tea going into the harbor and she-nymphs fighting over it, a metaphor for women’s ambivalence toward a boycott. Warren was pessimistic about whether women could sustain a boycott, so much so that in 1790 an editor had to explain that Warren’s “opinion of the equity” of the Tea Party was not to be found in her Toryesque view of its success.²³

Wolcott’s idea that men let women have tea was a handy conceit. It positioned men as chivalrous heads of households indulging their women. During prohibition, Reading Beatty hoped Enoch Green would “allow” his wife tea.²⁴ Given that tea was brewed and served by the pot, this obscured what the men were doing: indulging themselves by allowing women, as mistresses of the table, to pour tea for everyone.

To characterize tea as a women’s problem could be to call upon women to become political to fix it. “If the Ladies in America will agree to use no More East India tea,” Rev. William Tennent III wrote, their men will be saved. Else they would fell men with their womanish sin: for women’s “trivial Pleasure” in tea was taken “at the Expense of the Liberties” of their men. “Will any Female American indulge herself in so trifling an Amusement at the Danger of the Lives and Liberties of all she holds dear?” The ministry believes that “rather than give up their darling Tea Dish Ceremony, you will suffer this Empire to be enslaved, and your Husbands Throats to be cut.” “My dear Ladies, have you any Spirit? … If you thought you could do any Thing to save your Country, I’m sure you would do it … if you will only deny yourselves—what? … Only a meer” dish of tea. “All America is threatened with a Deluge of Blood from this accursed Tea.” It was tea that had caused the port of Boston to be shut, the Administration of Justice Act (aka the “Murder Act”) to be passed, armies to be sent to North America “to put you to death if you oppose” them. “I cannot think you so divested of all love to your Country,” Tennent told women, as to drink tea. Tea is the “Hinge on which our Freedom turns.” “Every Ounce of Tea you buy, will I fear be paid for by the Blood of your Sons.” Show “American Patriotism extends even to the Fair Sex.” Tennent’s writing was “obvious hyperbole,” but so were all the other evocations of streets running with blood and conspiracies to enslave the populace penned in 1774—the difference was that Tennent thought women could do something about it.²⁵

Tennent thought women were stupid. He was over-the-top to be sure women got the point. He was not alone. David Ramsay likewise explained that tea was an “engine of slavery.” Parliament offered “Tea, chains and military law.” Buying tea constituted “high treason against three million Americans.” (A comment that was as much an offense to logic as to math.) A “guardian” spirit had warned colonists against tea: “Taste not the forbidden fruit, for in the day ye eat thereof, ye shall surely die.” To be forgetful about the politics of tea now was, well, womanish. Ramsay fretted that “Here and there a silly Eve, regardless of her countries call, stretches forth her unthinking hand, and receives the accursed herb with all its baneful attendants.”²⁶

Ramsay solved the problem of “silly” and “unthinking” women by explaining tea in terms of beauty and babies, topics he thought women would understand. Stop drinking tea, oh “young and fair,” to “attract the notice of the other sex.” It “will either suffuse your faces with a deadly paleness, or what is worse, with a sallow hue, to the upper exclusion of the lovely red.” And it will endanger the fetus, too. Claims that tea impaired looks were old. In 1737 the New-England Weekly Journal alleged that tea contained “Bile”; dried women’s faces; “shrivels their Skin”; and caused “Wrinkles” and “Deformity”; but now there were political reasons to repeat this. It is unclear who believed them given tea’s prominent role in courtship.²⁷

The cartoon The Able Doctor gendered tea, too. The image inspired a poem in the South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal as South Carolinians were discussing a boycott. The poet reinterpreted the scene from rape to rape resisted, and at least one colonial printing of the cartoon retitled the image “Persevering Americans,” to emphasize this. Resistance connoted virtue both in the sense of male politics and female sexual purity. Faced with North’s teapot, the virtuous woman did not lie back and think of England; she fought back. Such resistance was dangerous: “because, her Virtue does refuse/Her Country’s Poison” “they do her abuse” more. But America virtuously spat the tea back at her assailants anyway—and such perseverance “alone can bring t’ our Country Joy.” The poet encouraged colonial women to spit out their tea, too. It is “such like her who may our Freedom save / And such, alone” who “are loyal, virtuous, brave.” Tea abstainers were the good, unsullied women whom good men would “Love.” Tea drinkers, by contrast, were treacherous, craven, cowardly, despoiled, and unloved.²⁸

One wonders how compelling women found this. Nominally about women, the poem was by and for men. Much of what survives from the anti-tea campaign comes from male-dominated venues. Newspapers were aimed at male readers. They focused on either politics or business, male subjects. Newspapers included off-color doggerel not just on rape, but on “bigot Papists,” pregnant slaves, dead prostitutes, dead Jews, and so on.²⁹ These were not topics to be discussed in mixed company, let alone at tea parties, but ribaldry meant to be read aloud in male-dominated taverns or coffee shops.

Resisting Gendering

Some Patriotic women argued against the gendering of tea. A Planter’s Wife lamented that tea drinking was considered a sign of women’s “Vanity, Ambition, and Pride” and not men’s. “Don’t cast reflections on our sex / Because the weaker sort we be,” wrote a member of the Bedford, Rhode Island Daughters of Liberty, “We’ll fight it out with courage free / Before we’ll lose our liberty.” “[M]any unjust Reflections have been cast on us,” wrote Andromache. “Our Countrymen have … been told, that their greatest Enemies are those of their own Houses, and scruple not to affirm, that their Wives and Daughters” broke the last boycott “and will, most certainly be the Cause of this” one breaking too. But Patriotic women would give the lie to tea’s gendering. “We have now an Opportunity to manifest the Fallacy of the Invidious Insinuation, or forever lye under the Imputation of it.” For all her pessimism about women’s resolve, Mercy Otis Warren thought no higher of men: “Few manly bosoms feel a nobler flame” than the women who “round folly’s vortex play.” This left resistance to the few “good Cornelias” and “worthy men” who would “fight for freedom, and for virtue bleed.”³⁰

A tea merchant wrote the best riposte to the gendering of tea. William Beadle, whose puckish advert about the Boston Tea Party was noted previously, satirized the gendering of tea in his tea advertisement “Addressed to the LADIES.” Beadle recapitulated the notion that tea was feminine. “Fair Ladies,” he wrote in early 1775, “ ‘tis not very arch, / To talk about the first of March, / That woful day, when each of ye, / Must leave your darling Nectar, TEA!” Poor Beadle still had “a hundred Weight, or so” and asked his female readers to “buy” up his tea before the Association began. Having asked the “LADIES” to buy, he joked about the stock they might still leave in his shop. “Yet stop a moment! on my Life! / For now I think on’t I’ve a Wife! / And if she proves of Eve the Daughter, / To have a Kind of Hank’ring after / This noxious Herb,” how could he save her? Would not the she-fiend crave her fix, find “Ax or Hatchet,” and “lay on, / With Arm and Will, both bold and stout,” open crates and “find this potent Poison out”? “[H]elp us,” Beadle begged his female buyers, “keep our virtue sound / And quickly purchase” every pound.³¹

What did Patriots make of this? Beadle himself had made a public donation to Boston relief the previous year. That, and the poem’s promise that Beadle was “no Tory” and would “obey” Congress, created space for jest. Did women, buying tea for pharisaical men who blamed women for their own tea drinking, warm to his mockery of male claims of female “addiction”? Beadle must have hoped they would, for his poem strikes at the double meaning of tea consumption—consumption as buying and consumption as drinking—behind which the slippery idea of a special female taste for tea hid. Beadle, a shopkeeper, knew women did the buying and appealed to them on this ground, mocking the idea that they had a special thirst for tea to curry favor with them as shoppers. His ad had a final irony: though his wife Lydia went crazy with the ax in his poem, it would be Beadle who, impoverished by the Association, the Patriots’ ever-debasing paper currency, and the war, ultimately snapped, tragically slaughtering his family in 1782 with two pistols, a carving knife, and an ax.³² They were causalities of wartime economics, hyperinflation, and maybe tea politics.

Rhetorical Femininity

Many anti-tea essays had female bylines, whether the author was female or not. “Rhetorical femininity,” as Tedra Osell calls this, was hardly new: Benjamin Franklin wrote as “Silence Dogood” in 1722. The use of female pseudonyms was an established practice in the British press. Male and female writers both used female “masks.” In the colonies, rhetorical women defended tea as healthier than alcohol in the 1720s and 1730s and attacked George Whitfield and the Great Awakening in the 1740s. Both issues combined gender and politics and turned on the blurred boundary between private and public life. Masks obscured authors and presented women as archetypes. Bylines like Silence Dogood, A Planter’s Wife, or, as in one 1773 article, “Hannah Hopeful, Sarah Faithful, Mary Truth and Abigail Trust,” deployed the authors’ female virtue “as a policing force” upon women and men.³³

Readers recognized pennames as guises. David Ramsay’s female voice in his “Sermon on Tea” was blatantly inconsistent; perhaps the pretense was too obvious to bother maintaining. Seeing a female byline, readers often assumed the real author was a man. Nevertheless, rhetorical femininity was useful. The female voice provided another way to address the tea question, as women urging other women to abstain could take a different tone than men urging each other not to drink tea. Male and female authors gained power with anonymous and abstract pseudonyms: “A Lady” was every lady rather than one in particular. Male authors also found the rhetorical value of speaking for a larger group attractive, whether writing as a “Lady” or, as Samuel Seabury and John Dickinson, as “farmers.” Rhetorical femininity included real and imaginary women, which makes a tally of female writers difficult. But their gendered discussion of expected male and female behavior mattered regardless of who wrote it.³⁴

“A Lady’s Adieu to Her Tea-Table” was an idealized portrait of gender norms. The woman lived in domestic refinement, listening to and learning from her man. She was “taught”—by her husband—“(and believe it is fact), / That our ruin is aimed in the late act” (the Tea Act). Enlightened, she bade “FAREWELL” to tea. She swore to “die in the cause” before drinking more, for “we” women “can quit when we please.” The author of a poem “Written by a LADY, on receiving a handsome Set of TEA CHINA” regarded her tea set with “Horrour” and swore to “resign” it. Both poems were didactic and demonstrative, their purported authors’ archetypes modeling renunciation. By contrast, the essay “Arabella’s Complaint,” written in the voice of a nagging wife, satirized female desire for tea to encourage women to stick to the boycott. Arabella’s question to Congress—“are we forever to be debarred the use of India Teas!”—was made shrewish to encourage women who thought this way to hold their tongues.³⁵

Whether such strategies succeeded is another question. Exhortation is no proof anyone listened. The “Adieu” appeared in January 1774 after the Boston Tea Party; Virginians did not broadly renounce tea until May. In South Carolina, Patriotic women like Eliza Pinckney and Mrs. William Henry Drayton consumed tea until just before the Association began.³⁶

Emasculating with Tea

When Patriots associated tea with women, they often effeminized it to target men. The gendering of tea was a running gag with which men might mock one another by charging effeminacy into abstention. Patriots emasculated male tea drinkers with rhetorical women in a morality tale for, by, and about men. Tea was thus an “evening dish” for women who sat at their “tea-table” (a feminized space) and gossiped—allegedly a female habit. The boycott against tea, according to David Ramsay, faced “a female army” of tea drinkers driven “entirely” by womanish “whim and pride.” The Pennsylvania Journal ran a mock petition on March 1, 1775, in which “Diverse OLD WOMEN,” including “old women of the male gender,” requested an exemption from non-consumption. “A Physician” warned the Newport Mercury that because of tea “The Bodies of men are enfeebled and enervated” and “hysterics [an affliction of the womb], which used to be peculiar to the women … now attack both sexes indiscriminately.” Ramsay agreed that tea drinking caused “Histeria” in both sexes and had “reduced the robust masculine habit of men, to a feminine softness.” “[I]t has turned the men into women, and the women into—God knows what.”³⁷

Patriots thought there was something androgynous about moderates who lacked the stuff to stand up for their country. When Middlesex, Virginia Patriots failed to resolve against the Coercive Acts as others had in 1774, one writer punned, “when a number of such creatures, / With womens hearts, and manly features, / Their country’s gen’rous schemes perplex, / I own, I hate this MIDDLE-SEX.” Such were the “hegemonic norms” of the “grammar of manhood” that Patriots applied to the Revolution. Patriots who conceived of the Revolution in terms of manly strength and virtue versus female indolence, “Luxury and Dissipation” saw tea as part of the world of virtue-less cuckolds and ministerial sybarites, whom real men resisted.³⁸

George Washington explained that the Revolution tested whether Americans would “act like men.” Manliness might mean, as in the epigraph for this book, defending “our girls and wives” against the King’s attempt “to force” them to drink tea. It meant abstaining oneself. Women shamed men who bought tea anyway. In Bedford, Rhode Island, the Sons of Liberty threatened to hand a tea buyer over to the Daughters of Liberty if he did not give his tea up first, for which the Daughters mocked him in the press. There was also the story about virtuous Sarah Boudinot, who, when offered tea by Governor Franklin of New Jersey, tossed the tea out the window: a royal governor shown true grit by a girl. Such incidents were not far removed from the skimmingtons that publicly shamed men who violated matrimonial norms. Women were, as Al Young describes, “exhorters” of men not to drink tea, just as their presence in mobs and riots exhorted or humiliated the mob’s target.³⁹ Patriots made women into rhetorical tools for keeping men in their place.

Women’s success in giving up tea was an effective tool, too. The emasculating contrast between the Bedford Daughters of Liberty—who had boycotted tea—and the weaselly little man caught buying it was plain enough. Patriots announced that in response to the Association, Wilmington, North Carolina’s “Ladies … entirely declined the use of Tea” by March 1775. Their natural weakness made this a “sacrifice by the fair Sex,” which “should inspire” men to have at least as much “firmness and public virtue” as their wives (helpfully, the townswomen had already burned some of their husbands’ tea for them). In Providence, the women who burned their tea were “worthy” and had “Conviction,” meaning men who still drank it were unworthy and irresolute.⁴⁰

Tea itself could be given a gender, as in the campy Patriot description of tea as a prostitute. Thus, “the Funeral of Madam Souchong”:

She came into this Colony about 40 Years ago, and hath been greatly caressed by all Ranks. She lived in Reputation for several Years, but at length became a common Prostitute among the lowest Class of People. She became very poor, and her Price was so lowered that any One might have her Company for almost nothing. The Quality deserted her, and by hard Living in Log Houses and Wigwams, her Health was impaired. Broken Spirits and Hystericks seized her, and she died on the first Day of March 1775, at Midnight.⁴¹

The “Funeral” implied that female tea drinkers were loose, unlike the “worthy women” who burned tea. It implied that tea was filthy and that men dirtied themselves when they touched it. It implied that tea was widely consumed, even on the frontier. And, by making tea a woman, it made men the consumers who mattered, the ones who might “have her Company for almost nothing” and therefore needed virtue to resist. Tea was a woman because men wanted her.

Madame Souchong’s obituary appeared in Rhode Island and Virginia newspapers, ribaldry to be read to the boys in the tavern. It was, to its audience, hilarious: is there a more perfectly misogynistic joke than one about a dead whore read aloud in the pub while the village prostitute is listening? She died implicitly by disease and explicitly by hysteria. Some said tea caused hysteria; others blamed a lack of sex. The straightforward reading was that the dirty old hag went crazy and died because men would not touch her anymore: men “deserted” her and left her in “Broken Spirits,” which killed her.

Loyalists

Loyalists deployed gendered rhetoric around tea, too. The caricature of women yearning for tea could even facilitate the subversion of the Association. When Concord, Massachusetts adopted the Association in January 1775, heads of family (including two single women) signed. Stephen Hosmer, by contrast, signed on condition he was permitted “tea for his wife only.”⁴²

Samuel Seabury played upon the theme of men protecting and providing for women. He deemed the Patriots scrubs for denying men “a dish of tea to please our wives.” “I hate to stint my wife and daughters,” he wrote, flinging the caricature of the woman tea drinker back at Congress. Colonists, Seabury warned, would have you “open your doors to” peeping committeemen, “let them examine your tea-cannisters, and molasses-jugs, and your wives and daughters petty-coats.” Susanna Wright struck a similar note when she asked how Congress could be “so cruel to the whole female World, to debar them so totally of their favourite Potation?”⁴³ Patriots could be made out as a threat to women.

“PENELOPE House-Wife” implied Patriots were effete abusers in her letter to her “dear Country Women” in the Norfolk Intelligencer. Her “poor deluded” “patriotic Husband” “has broken all the cups, and denies his family their accustomed use of Tea for breakfast.” What had he done? Tea was the mark of “civilization.” She could not fault a “social cup” among “well-bred” people. She thought the men who declined tea on political grounds suffered a “sentimental delicatesse,” and she urged young women not to marry such men. Penelope also claimed to oppose “arbitrary power:”

But you know, my dear country women, that there are tyrants at the head of little families as well as at the head of great empires; and I always thought that our sex have an undoubted right to carry their resistance as great lengths, if needful, in opposition to domestic tyranny in the one instance, as the men pretend to, in their opposition to state tyranny in the other.

She would elaborate, but hush, the Patriotic brute she married was coming home, so she had to stop.⁴⁴

Other British and Loyalist writers saw women participating in politics as a world turned upside down. One mock letter, appearing in New England and London, pretended to be from the “Daughters of Liberty.” Aware that hanging, drawing, and quartering were punishments against high treason, these women were “determined, constantly to assemble at each other’s Houses, to HANG the Tea-Kettles, DRAW the Tea, and QUARTER the Toast.” For engraver Philip Dawe, a pupil of William Hogarth, political women were nightmarish, fantastic, and silly. In “A Society of Patriotic Ladies” (1775, see figure 9.1), Dawe depicted Edenton women’s non-importation agreement as a topsy-turvy world: mannish women, ugly hags, loose ladies, neglected children, even a slave seems to want to join—but the most absurd act, the one Dawe drew front and center, was women signing a boycott. Dawe’s women could not control themselves: they sign, dump out their tea canisters, then drink from a giant bowl of tea in the back. They act like animals, hardly better than the dog urinating on a tea canister in the front. The print is didactic and absurd, evoking Hieronymus Bosch, and mocks the Patriot movement by suggesting it was so silly, women joined it. Dawe’s “Alternative of Williamsburg” showed black men and white women among the Patriot boycotters, similarly delegitimizing Patriot opposition, casting it as a commoners’ charivari, not real politics. Edenton’s women did not actually mention tea in their association—it was a generalized non-importation agreement, not specific to tea (the Edenton Tea Party, as it was later called, was a misnomer). But Britons, reading the Edenton agreement, assumed it must have been about tea, hence Dawe’s joke. Contemporary Arthur Iredell assumed it was a “protest agst Tea Drinking.” “Is there a female congress at Edenton, too?” he laughed—for if congresses were low enough for women to join, that would be hilarious. In A Dialogue between a Southern Delegate and His Spouse (1774), James Rivington emasculated Congress further: he described women as knowing better than their husbands and Patriots as contemptible because they were below their women.⁴⁵

Colonial women consumed tea at the same levels their menfolk did. And they engaged in tea politics. Tea fit into a complex array of gender and class roles. These roles gave tea drinking rhetorical power: one could uphold examples of female abstention, attack men who drank tea for having less virtue than their sisters, or admonish Patriots who deprived women of tea as ungentlemanly. These discussions of women’s abstention were part of the propaganda attempt to get women and men to abandon the drink and make prohibition possible.