A Woman’s World: How Afternoon Tea Defined and Hindered Victorian Middle Class Women
Heath, Mary E. (Illinois Wesleyan University)
Constructing the Past: Vol. 13: Iss. 1, Article 1 (2012)
Abstract
“Etiquette [was] that rule of conduct which [was] recognized by polite society, and to which all who [desired] to be admitted into fashionable circles [had to] submit.” English Victorian women, as this advice from 1856 in A Manual of Etiquette For Ladies
Tea was not women’s chosen domain; rather, their adoption of the tea ritual was the result of male subordination. Coffee and tea were introduced to England as social beverages at approximately the same time. The first coffee house was established in Oxford in 1654. Just ten years later, Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese bride of King Charles II, reintroduced the medicinally used tea to the English court as an enjoyable beverage. Women, legally excluded from coffee houses, copied court society, and tea was born as women’s drink. Though tea culture would develop over the next two hundred years, the formal tea party was born out of the specific needs of Victorian society.
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