THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

Careful, believed a well-equipped tea table as important as a wedding ring. 47 Rhetoric in
this period frequently satirized women as retiring to “tea and scandal.” Haywood, for
example, asked: “Where have the Curious an Opportunity of informing themselves of the
Intrigues of the Town, like that they enjoy over a TEA-TABLE, on a Lady’s Visiting
Day?” 48 In the late eighteenth century, contemporaries lauded the civilizing effects of
conversation with a virtuous woman. However, such examples co-existed with anxieties
about the possible excesses of female speech. Evangelicals Hannah More and Thomas
Gisborne warned against unguarded female speech and Gisborne, in particular,
championed the virtue of female silence. 49 The tea ritual of Cowper’s poem, with its
emphasis on domestic bliss, suggested civilizing conversation could be found at the tea
table. Yet, the tea ritual could quite easily slide into social unruliness and neglect as
women used the ritual to gossip and to demonstrate their ability to consume.
Many Britons believed commercial expansion had infected British women and
weakened the empire. Mary Wollstonecraft claimed women were “rendered weak and
47 Eliza Haywood, The Female Spectator (London: A. Millar, W. Law, and R. Cater, 1775), II; 80.
48 As quoted in Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, “Tea, Gender, and Domesticity in Eighteenth-
Century England,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 23 (1994), 132; Eliza Haywood, The Tea-Table;
Or, a Conversation Between Some Polite Persons of Both Sexes, at a Lady’s Visiting Day. Wherein are
Represented the Various Foibles, and Affectations, which Form the Character of an Accomplish’d Beau, or
Modern Fine Lady. (London: J. Roberts, 1725), 1.
49 Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth
Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 109-110; Kathryn Gleadle, “‘Opinions Deliver'd in
Conversation’: Conversation, Politics, and Gender in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Civil Society in
British History, ed. Jose Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 63-64. See also Kowaleski-
Wallace, Consuming Subjects, 34-36. Kowaleski-Wallace argues that the tea table conversation of working
class women is a form of resistance of “patriarchal hierarchy as well as male economic and sexual control.
Even though her rebellion operates only within her circle, it nonetheless suggests the subversive power of
women’s speech across class lines: women’s voice retains the power to subvert discipline, to speak audibly
of needs and desires.”
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