Suffragist Discussion Read the article then answer the questions:How did class and race play into the suffragists’ strategies? Can you think of similar way

Suffragist Discussion Read the article then answer the questions:How did class and race play into the suffragists’ strategies? Can you think of similar ways that foods are politicized today?use examples from the reading as well. Jessica Seweii
Boston University
“Tea and Suffrage
ABSTRACT
This article explores the special relationship between tea and woman suffrage in the
early twentieth century. It examines the use of tea by varied suffragists in the California
woman suffrage campaign of 191 I, showing how and why suffragists used tea as a tool
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for gaining the vote and why tea held a privileged position as a suffrage food. It explores
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the meanings and uses of tea in the United States at the turn of the century and argues
Society
that the feminine, domestic, and refined associations of tea made it particularly useful
for suffragists. It shows how tea was extensively used by suffragists, who served it and
sold it in aid of the cause, in order to make a claim for their domesticity and
refinement, even as they made relatively radical political claims and fought a popular
image of mannish, extremist suffragettes.
Keywords: gender, suffrage, tea, activism
Introduction
In 1912-13, the Lipton Tea Company ran a series of ads in TTie Woman
Voter, linking tea drinking to suffrage activity with poems, including:
Dear Ladies: If you’d win the men
‘Round to your way of thinking
Discuss the question now and then.
Across the table drinking
Lipton’s Tea. ‘
Why did Lipton’s see a link hetween suffrage and tea, one strong enough
to make it the hasis of their advertisements? And why did other tea-related
goods hold a special status in suffrage periodicals? “Votes for Women” cups
and dishes from the Art China Import Co. and specialty tea hiscuits,
“Suffragette Crackers,” were among the very few commercial goods
advertised in The Women’s Journal and The Woman Voter to he marked
explicitly with a suffrage slogan. The other goods marked with suffrage
slogans were typically political pins and postcards, and were made for
suffrage organizations to sell as fundraisers, while these tea-related suffrage
items were sold commercially, for profit.^ Why did tea hold a special status
in relation to the suffrage movement in the early twentieth century?
This article will explore this special relationship between tea and suffrage
in the context of the 1911 California woman suffrage campaign. It will argue
that suffragists made use, at times deliberately and at other times perhaps
unconsciously of the particular meanings of tea in the early twentiethcentury United States. Suffragists’ use of tea was commented on by a
4 8 8 :: Jessieii Sewell
DOI:
10.2752/175174408X389148
vol. II :: no. 4
numher of journalists. An August 11, 1911 article in the San Francisco Call,
describing the use of tea hy California suffragists, had the headline “Boston
Tea Party is Far Eclipsed by California Women.” In this article, and in a host
of other articles in San Francisco papers, the Neiu York Times, and suffrage
periodicals, suffragists’ love of tea was repeatedly proclaimed.^ Tea was
constantly mentioned as part of suffrage parlor meetings, suffrage
headquarters activities, suffrage fundraisers, and suffrage products, and was
associated with women’s suffrage in a way not paralleled hy any other
commodity or substance. California suffragists made use of tea in domestic
contexts, serving tea in their parlors in the interest of the cause, as well as in
commercial contexts, selling tea both by the cup in tearooms they managed
themselves and by the box in department stores, trade fairs, and other
commercial venues.
In their multiple uses of tea, California suffragists variously highlighted
meanings that tea carried, including domesticity, femininity, whiteness,
elitism, and even modernity.
The California Woman Suffrage Campaign of 1911
The successful 1911 California woman suffrage campaign was a significant
victory for suffragists, who saw it as a “turning point for the national women’s
movement,” which was working to get the vote on a state-by-state basis.”*
Only five states gave women the vote prior to the California victory in 1911 :
Wyoming in 1890, Colorado in 1893, Utah and Idaho in 1896, and
Washington in 1910, fourteen years after Utah and Idaho. Once California
women won the vote, they immediately set out to share the secrets of their
success with other suffragists, both through the publications How We Won
the Vote in California and Winning Equal Suffrage in California and through
the work of many California organizers on campaigns in other states. The
California campaign helped to turn the tide, and California’s 1911 victory
was followed by Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona in 1912, Illinois in 1913,
Montana and Nevada in 1914, and by several other states soon afterward.
These state victories helped lead to the passage of the federal amendment in
1920.
The 1911 California campaign modeled important new methods of
suffrage organizing and campaigning. Rather than being entirely dominated
by the white, native-born, elite women who had long been the primary
suffrage activists, the California campaign was run by a coalition of suffrage
groups, ranging from the Club Women’s Franchise League to the Wage
Earners’ Suffrage League, who used a wide variety of tactics to target a broad
swath of voters, including immigrants, workers, and African Americans.^ The
coalition also worked carefully on creating an image for woman suffrage in
Tea and Suffrage :: 4 8 9
California and diffusing it in a number of ways, including through
newspapers, which were targeted by an organized press bureau that sent
news items and photographs of suffragists to illustrate them. Their canny
use of publicity was particularly influential with suffragists in other states,
and was taken up with particular vigor by N e w York suffragists in 1915.^
California suffragists used several tactics explicitly borrowed from
advertising, including creating a unified symbol, color, and slogan for the
campaign and repeating them as often as possible, through a wide range of
venues including store windows, an electric sign, posters, postcards, and
stickers.
In constructing an image for themselves, the California suffragists had to
work against two powerful existing ideas about suffragists. T h e first was an
image of suffragists as masculine, “no longer like a woman” because
interested in participating in politics.^ This image was epitomized by
antisuffrage cartoons that used the trope of suffrage transforming the roles
of the sexes in the home, as suited women went out to vote and aproned men
were left in the kitchen with the baby T h e second was the image of radical
suffragettes in England, who were smashing windows and otherwise using
aggressive methods that conspicuously did not follow the rules of proper
deportment and often broke the law. Because of their desire to distinguish
themselves from the English suffragettes, California suffragists, like many
others in the United States, preferred to be called suffragists.^ This
distinction was noted in a contemporary cartoon that contrasted thin, welldressed suffragists in elaborate hats, holding a sign saying “Votes for Women
(please),” and bowing to a policeman labeled “law and order” with wildhaired, broom-wielding, hoot-wearing, unattractive suffragettes, whose sign
read “Votes for Women!!!!”, in the act of throwing a brick at the policeman’s
head. Both of these images were used actively by antisuffrage forces, who
argued that the women who wanted the vote were those too unattractive to
he able to use traditional feminine wiles, and referred to their opponents as
“manly and mud-slinging suffragettes.””^
To combat both the idea of suffragists as unwomanly and as violently
radical, California suffragists worked to underline their femininity and
propriety They emphasized two very different aspects of femininity: youthful
beauty and domesticity. T h e image of suffragists as young, beautiful, and
fashionable was remarked upon in an article in the scrapbook of Fannie
McLean, a San Francisco suffragist:
The “shrieking sisterhood” of suffragists is a thing of the past. No
more shall man be compelled to defend himself against the short
haired, vituperative enthusiasts of the last century. In contrast with
the “old order that passeth” is the suffragette of the present day, who
must be a dainty feminine creature with the prettiest of manners
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and clothes and a vast store of logical argument on the tip of her
tongue.”
Articles and authors often remarked on the beauty and modernity of the
young suffragists, who, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “refute the
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popukr impression that the cause is only espoused by the advanced and the
unbeautiful.”‘^ Similarly the San Francisco Examiner reported that the
ushers at a meeting in the Scottish Rite Temple on September 29, 1911
were “a brilliant throng of beautiful women gowned in a style benefiting a
gala occasion, and made a very pretty picture in itself an argument for equal
suffrage it would take a mile of logic to overcome.”‘-^ The presentation of
young, stylish women as one face of suffrage was a deliberate strategy; the
official report of the committee that organized San Francisco public
meetings argued that well-dressed ushers, wearing tailored costumes in the
afternoon and “full afternoon dress” in the evenings, functioned as “a
convincing argument against the claim that the suffragist is not essentially
feminine.””’ The association of youth and beauty with suffrage was further
underlined by the stylish image chosen as the emblem of the 1911
California campaign and reproduced in posters, postcards, and on stickers.’^
This poster, the winner of a widely advertised competition, showed a young
woman in front of the Golden Gate, with the setting sun creating a halo
around her head. She wears a long straight dress and a robe reminiscent of
the designs of Paul Poiret, with elaborate embroidery along the hem, and
holds a scroll proclaiming “Votes for Women.” The overall style of the poster
is reminiscent of the Vienna secessionists, and is very modern for 191 1.
In addition to constructing an image of feminine youth and beauty,
suffragists also worked hard to emphasize their domesticity and maternal
femininity. Mahy of their arguments for the vote were based on womens
domestic role. Antisuffragists often based their arguments against suffrage
on the ideal that womens place was in the home, and argued that giving
women the vote would threaten the centrality of the home for women and
destroy the sanctity of the home. Suffragists countered by describing the
vote as an extension of women’s duties in the home, a way for women to
protect the health and morality of their children. They argued that in the
modern world women needed the vote in order to fulfill their role as
mothers, because how else could they control the purity of the milk their
children drank or the cleanliness of the air, water, and streets they
encountered every day?’^ Suffragists also argued for the vote as a way of
improving womens power as municipal housekeepers. In the municipal
housekeeping movement women’s clubs (largely white and middle- to uppermiddle-class) organized downtown clean-ups, donated trash bins to relieve
the problem of litter and teacb citizens to keep the city clean, pushed for and
often organized street cleaning, beautified cities through street furnishings
Tea and Suffrage :: 4 9 ‘
and other measures, and educated decision makers and others by sponsoring
lectures and plans by urban planning experts.”^ Many suffrage cartoons and
postcards, including ones used in the California campaign, argued that
vvomens votes would make the city cleaner and more moral, showing
suffrage women cleaning up dirty politics and the dirty city with brooms and
vacuum cleaners. “‘ In addition to making the political argument for the vote,
these postcards also emphasized women s domesticity, even as they extended
it into the public realm.
As well as arguing for the relationship between domesticity and the vote,
many suffragists emphasized their own domesticity through their modes of
participation in the movement. They sold homemade jam, as in other states
suffragists had sold cakes and other home-produced items, showing that
they retained their domestic skills, even as they argued for their rights as full
members of the public. As will be discussed at more length later in the
article, many elite suffragists also held meetings in their parlors rather than
public halls, further associating the suffrage movement with the home, the
“proper” place for women. In both of these cases, women suffragists were in
part simply continuing their common practices, such as selling jam and
handiwork at charity fairs and entertaining other club women in their
homes. However, these practices also Functioned to emphasize their
feminine domesticity a trait which California suffragists were interested in
highlighting.
The images of suffragists produced in the California campaign tended to
be of elite women. The suffragists enacting domesticity in their campaign
activities worked very much within the mode of club women, by entertaining
in their homes. In addition the imagery of municipal housekeeping used
within the campaign referenced the elite club women who were part of that
movement. Similarly the image of young, beautiful suffragists is of distinctly
elite and fashionable creatures. This helped to distinguish them further from
the English suffragettes, who included working women, “mill women with
the muscles of men and the strength of Amazons,” who were major players
in assaults on the residences of cabinet members and other radical actions.’^
Working-class women were referenced in the arguments of the California
campaign. For example they argued for the importance of the vote for
nonelite women who were struggling to bring up their children in dirty cities
and also for working women who needed the vote to have more control over
their working eonditions. However, for the most part the image California
suffragists produced was of elite women working on behalf of more passive
working women, except in their outreach to unions, which was done entirely
by members of the Wage Earners Suffrage League.
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Drinking Tea for Suffrage
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Tea was used by many California suffragists as one element in the
construction of their image. To present themselves as feminine and
domestic, they made use of the existing meanings of tea in multiple ways,
through tea parties, tearooms, and selling tea. In particular they harnessed
the feminine and elite meanings that tea had come to have in America by the
beginning of the twentieth century. Tea had a long history as a feminine
drink, and was tied to femininity in England from its beginnings, as tea was
linked to the person of Catharine of Braganza, of Portugal, who married
Charles II of England in 1662. This marriage secured British trading routes
with China, where tea was grown, and was celebrated in a poem by Edward
Waller, “Of Tea, commended by her majesty.” In her book Constiming
Subjects Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace argues this poem “publicly linked the
drinking of tea to the queen” and “effectively promoted the drinking of tea
as a definitively British, upper-class, feminine, and domestic activity.”^”
Tea began as an expensive substance, as it was imported and highly taxed
by the British government, both in England and its colonies. Not only was
tea expensive, but so were the accoutrements required to properly brew and
serve it, which typically included not just a teapot, often of silver, and
porcelain teacups, but also a tea canister, a slop bowl, containers for cream
and sugar, plus tongs for the sugar, spoons, and saucers.^’ Tea began as a
drink of the upper classes, and in the American context, this class
association has to a large extent remained.^^
As Kowaleski-Wallace has argued, tea was also a particularly domestic
drink—the feminine, domestic counterpart to masculine, public coffee.^-^
The tea table became a symbol of feminine, domestic refinement as well as
of female consumption, of tea, of china (a major consumer craze in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth century), and of gossip. The tea table was
used as a symbol of feminine conversation, gossip, and bagatelles in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as expressed in the titles of many
books of anecdotes for women published in both England and the United
Tea was associated with the domestic and the feminine in America as well.
Richard Hooker, in Food and Drink in America, cites an English visitor who
wrote that tea was the “darling” of New England women in 1740, who
“sipped tea for an hour or more in the morning and again in the afternoon,”
always using an elaborate China tea equipage.^^ As in Britain tea was drunk
primarily in the home, and always served by a woman, either the mother or
eldest daughter, to family members and guests, as has been illustrated by
Rodris Roth’s careful study of tea drinking in eighteenth-century America.^”^
This contrasted to coffee, which was commonly drunk by men in public
coffeehouses, although during the eighteenth-century boycott of tea coffee
Toa and Suffrage :: 493
often replaced tea in domestic rituals.^^ Hooker mentions as well that
American coffeehouses, like their British counterparts, did not serve tea, and
suggests it was because tea was eonsidered “too effeminate.”^^
One potentially feminine attribute of tea is its lack of alcohol, and it was
often promoted as a temperance drink.: Its nonalcoholic but caffeinated
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nature, which means that it “cheers, but does not inebriate,” combined with
its association with the home, made it the perfect antiliquor.^^ For example
a circular quoted by Gideon Nye, in his 1850 pamphlet on tea and the tea
trade, argued that “the man who enjoys a cup of good tea, and can get it, with
its necessary concomitants, fire and comfort, at home, will not be in much
danger of turning out after the labors of the day to seek the poisonous
excitement of the gin house.”^° Gideon Nye himself argued for the
“beneficial influences of the extended use of the leaf, as contributing to
temperance and to the domestic and social comforts of the people, and
hence to their refinement,” an argument which also underlines the elass
associations of tea as a drink of refinement.^^’ The association between tea
and temperance became particularly salient in the context of the strong
temperance movement in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
America. This particular meaning was a double-edged sword for suffragists,
however, for although the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was an
important power within the woman suffrage movement, the necessity of
winning the votes of drinking men meant that the California suffragists in
1911 tended to play down their associations with the temperance
movement.
• In the nineteenth century, the meanings of tea in the British and
American contexts began to diverge. In Britain, especially after tea began to
be produced commercially in colonial India in the mid-nineteenth century,
tea became a drink shared by all classes and both sexes, although the
association of tea with the home, and with women, still remained to some
extent. For example the feminine domestic association of serving tea is
expressed by the phrase “I’ll be mother,” meaning “I will pour the tea.” In
America hot tea never became as common as in England, although it was
drunk quite widely in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Waverly
Root and Richard de Rochemont, in Eating in America, argue that Americans
tended not to drink much tea after the mid-nineteenth century because of
problems with supply: during the war of 1812 tea was hard to get and
Americans became accustomed to drinking coffee, while after the war the
quality of tea available was terrible, while coffee was cheap and good.”*^ By
the second half of the nineteenth century, Ameri…
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