The Colonial Tea Trade and Women’s Suffrage
By Sneha Mehta
The suffragists didn’t just drink tea for refreshment, but used it as a central feature of their political strategy. Photo by Harry Cunningham @harry.digital from Pexels.
Days before the first Women’s Rights Convention took place in the U.S. in 1848, renowned suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and other attendees sat around a parlor table, suitable for serving tea on, at Stanton’s home in Seneca Falls, N.Y., and drafted the Declaration of Sentiments. In 1920, the movement based on this declaration—which pronounced men and women equal—would culminate in the historic decision to grant the nation’s 27 million women the right to vote, also known as the 19th Amendment, the largest extension of voting rights in American history.
While the fact that the suffragists drafted this document on a tea table might appear an incidental or casual detail, it is testimony to tea’s powerful and unexpected role in the suffrage movement. The suffragists didn’t just drink tea for refreshment, but used it as a central feature of their political strategy. Across the nation, women like the wealthy Alva Belmont held “suffrage teas” as fundraisers where women could gather and discuss the cause.
Some suffragist organizations also sold tea to raise funds, like the Woman’s Suffrage Party of Northern California’s brand “Equality Tea,” “Votes for Women” tea in Southern California and “Suffrage Tea in a Special Box” in Pennsylvania. These teas came in varieties like Ceylon, English breakfast, young hyson, gunpowder and oolong, and many women boycotted the grocers who did not stock these brands. They sold ancillary products like cups and saucers and creamers inscribed with “Votes for Women” in elegant lettering as well. The suffragist cookbooks, which contained propaganda folded into elaborate recipes like those for Lady Baltimore cake and Almond Parfait, also contained basic guides for brewing tea. Throughout the movement, tea was closely linked to women and the way they exercised their political agency.
Tea appears in many charged historical moments like the Boston Tea Party, the Chinese Opium Wars and the Indian freedom movement, assisting in political protests, making and breaking empires, and empowering colonial enterprises. But tea itself has remained an adaptable agent. It has been used for both protest and plunder, sometimes simultaneously: The tea that helped American women take a leap forward in their quest for equality came from British tea estates in India, where colonial subjects worked under appalling labor conditions.
What is it about the humble beverage that makes it such a powerful and shapeshifting political agent? And despite its bloody history, how did it become so culturally feminized?
Before Stanton, Mott and Anthony could sip tea at fundraisers to campaign for their right to vote, American colonists dressed up as Native Americans dumped crates of imported tea into the Boston harbor to protest the unfair British-imposed taxation on the commodity. “No taxation without representation,” they exclaimed during the protest which would later become known as the Boston Tea Party of 1773. At the time of this event, nearly all the tea sold globally was grown in China and exported in huge quantities by the British, who were facing losses because the Chinese weren’t importing enough goods from them in return.
So, in the early 19th century, through careful acts of economic manipulation and two bloody wars between Britain and China known as the Opium Wars, the British wrested control of tea production and began to grow it on their plantations in India and Sri Lanka. But slavery was banned in the British Empire in 1834 under the Slavery Abolition Act, so the plantation owners hired indentured laborers or “coolies.” Nearly 80 percent of these laborers were women who were forcibly relocated and violently coerced in conditions modeled on the plantations in the antebellum U.S.
Not long after, tea, which was once an expensive and aristocratic drink, became cheap and plentiful around the world and found its way onto the suffragists' tables.
“Tea is a very malleable commodity: It can be used for both good or evil,” says Erika Rappaport, author of A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World, a book on how the tea industry shaped the global economy as we know it today. “Since it was originally produced or imported under controlled colonial conditions, it has always been politicized. And because tea is a mass commodity and can be taxed, it can pay for state-funded war but is also cheap enough to be effective for a consumer movement.”
In the early 19th century, the British wrested control of tea production and began to grow it on their plantations in India and Sri Lanka. Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh from Pexels.
Even though coffee was the more popular drink in the U.S. at the time, drinking tea was a symbol of groomed femininity, and it was particularly attractive to suffragists like Stanton and Belmont, who were educated, white, upper class women. Tea parties were a respectable way for women to gather, and the healthy, sobering quality of tea was considered antithetical to immoral beverages like alcohol.
“The story of tea connects in a large narrative arc, what I call the feminization of labor with the feminization of commodity,” says anthropologist Piya Chatterjee, expanding on the thesis of her book A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation. “When tea became one of the first globalized commodities, it was immediately connected to women and fantasies of the Orient. By the 19th century, though tea had become an extraordinary staple, the tea-coffee juxtaposition was sexualized, with coffee becoming masculinized as a virile American drink. And despite American Anglophobia, tea retained its deep DNA of feminization.”
Tea growing was associated with women as well: In the 18th century, the British were fascinated with the Chinese fetishism around pure tea plucked by the “nimble, virginal fingers,” as Chatterjee says, belonging to female plantation workers, which was then drunk by aristocratic Chinese women. Chinese culture remained very popular among American women well into the 19th century—Belmont held suffrage rallies in her specially decorated “Chinese Tea House” chinoiserie room in Marble House, her Newport, R.I., mansion.
The murky connection between the colonial tea trade, racism and the suffrage movement runs deep but is often overlooked. Jaime Sunwoo, a Korean-American performance artist, illustrates these fraught connections in her film Equality Tea, which was made for the Park Avenue Armory’s 100 Years 100 Women exhibition in celebration of the centennial of the 19th Amendment in 2020.
Alva Belmont held suffrage rallies in Marble House, her Newport, R.I., mansion. Photo by New York Times, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Sunwoo’s film uses paper puppets, pots of blooming jasmine tea, scenes from suffrage tea parties and an original score based on a suffragist anthem by Augusta Gray Gunn to bring the hypocrisies of the movement to life.
“The history of suffrage in the U.S. is often told through the big names like Stanton and Mott,” says Sunwoo. “But there are so many under-appreciated suffragists of color in our nation. And a lot of people were neglected and even actively attacked in the process. Yet, the glorious American history we learn centers white Americans.”
In the film, Sunwoo traces the long, bloody trail left by the British empire to sustain their tea habit. And while she acknowledges the suffragists’ many victories, she highlights the women of color who were instrumental in the suffrage movement, like the Black feminist Ida B. Wells and the women of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, a Native American tribe that is the oldest continuously functioning democracy in the world. In the mid-19th century, when the American state considered women as little more than the property of their husbands, the Haudenosaunee women had the right to vote, hold political office, act as judges and own property. Not only did they pave the way for the 19th Amendment, but they directly inspired suffragists like Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, who frequently interacted with the women of the confederacy. Despite this, the suffragists did not believe that racial disenfranchisement was a feminist issue—Equality Tea did not promote equality for all.
The movement’s racial conflict comes to a head in a scene from Sunwoo’s film where Stanton is seated around a table much like the famous tea table on which the Declaration of Sentiments was drafted and is seen to proclaim:
“Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book, making laws for Lydia Marie Child, Lucretia Mott or Fanny Kemble.”
Stanton said these words in a speech at a women’s rights convention in 1869, and they speak to the suffragists’ belief in upholding white supremacy. Even when the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, many Black Americans and Native Americans did not have access to the ballot, and Asian Americans were not even eligible for citizenship.
“I wanted to have the moment where Anthony and [Mott and Carrie Catt] say those things, to show that while they did amazing work, they weren’t perfect people,” said Sunwoo. “They struggled with intersectionality. The rights of black Americans were just as intertwined with those of women.”
The gloried history of the American suffrage movement contains many contradictions, including its simultaneous advocacy for both white supremacy and women’s rights, and its use of tea grown by indentured laborers in slavery-like conditions to promote women’s political equality. And while today, a century after the 19th Amendment, Black and Asian American women can vote, universal suffrage is still not a reality for the people of Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories, who have no say in presidential or congressional elections. Even on the plantations in India, labor conditions are better than a century ago, but a new kind of post-colonial class supremacy has emerged, as the laborers tend to be marginalized Adivasi and Dalit women.
“You cannot remove the questions of gender equality from race, caste, religion, and class,” says Chatterjee. “There is no pure woman subject, but multiple feminisms which are constantly in debate with each other.”
Tea is still the most widely drunk beverage in the world and continues to show up as a mascot in political struggles in countries like Russia, India and Thailand. Frances Perkins, the first American woman cabinet member, is believed to have gotten the idea of taxation as a revenue base for Social Security at a tea party in 1934. The suffragists’ use of tea as a novel commercial strategy has parallels in contemporary American culture, where socially conscious consumerism is considered a legitimate form of political engagement. While sipping a cup of tea, it is easy to forget what the suffragists knew well: that tea was an economic powerhouse that facilitated wars and revolutions, and that brewing a cup of tea can be a much more powerful statement than it appears to be.
