A Necessary Luxury. Julie E. Fromer

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.