“And that’s the tea.”
Alex Morgan and the Legacy of Tea as a Uniquely American and Powerfully Feminine Means of Political Expression
Roughly thirty minutes into the 2019 Women’s World Cup semifinal match between the U.S. and England, U.S. Women’s National Team Co-Captain Alex Morgan scored a decisive header goal, breaking an early tie while catapulting her team to a consummate — and profoundly symbolic — victory over America’s erstwhile motherland. As thousands in the stands erupted in deafening applause, Morgan took a victory lap, her arms outstretched and her smile wide. As her teammates gathered around her, the champion treated audiences to a post-goal celebration, parodying the drinking of a cup of tea — pinky erect and all.
While many found Morgan’s gesture to be harmless and fun-loving, several others lashed out, declaiming the gesture as “rude,” “classless,” “distasteful,” and “disrespectful.” Former British soccer player Faye White revealed she would “[have] put in a tackle” if she had been on the field with Morgan. Meanwhile, English broadcast personality Piers Morgan called for retribution, beseeching members of England’s team to feign “eating a Big Mac and large fries” after their predicted win.
Given the ubiquity of such celebrations in soccer (especially men’s soccer), it is rather curious why Morgan’s stunt struck such a nerve. Was it her defiance of gender norms that people took issue with? Or was it the fact that she chose tea-drinking as her rib of choice? To the latter, history tells us that Morgan’s celebration indeed echoes a long and deep-rooted legacy of American women’s reappropriation of tea as a means of powerful patriotic expression. During the colonial era, American colonists consumed tea in comparable quantities to our modern-day consumption of coffee,¹ but with much more sociocultural subtext. Framed as a “finely tuned performance,” the process of preparing, drinking, and serving tea functioned as a bona fide barometer for one’s “Britishness”and gentleman-like manners, an image bolstered by one’s possession of elegantly embellished teapots, sugar bowls, cream pitchers, platters, tongs, chests, trays, and tablecloths.² Carrying such social salience, tea was typically the first luxury good purchased by an American family with cash to spare.³ Tea-serving, moreover, was a constitutive part of American female “education”: “Young ladies,” writes historian Dorothy Mays, “needed to know the proper method for straining tea, how to send silent signals to refill a cup, and how to decline without offending.”⁴
Given the ubiquity of such celebrations in soccer (especially men’s soccer), it is rather curious why Morgan’s stunt struck such a nerve. Was it her defiance of gender norms that people took issue with? Or was it the fact that she chose tea-drinking as her rib of choice?
With the passage of the Townshend Acts of 1767 and 1768, however, tea’s social capital in the colonies began to disintegrate. Amid escalating tensions, the beverage was vilified as a damning marker of Loyalist sensibility and what CUNY professor Carol Berkin calls a “litmus test for colonial patriotism.”⁵ Women, Berkin tells us, were absolutely integral to this repositioning. Though without a political voice, they wielded their role in the domestic sphere to stage widespread boycotts of the motherland’s signature drink. Across the colonies, women beholden to the patriotic cause opted for “Liberty Tea,” a rebellious tea-substitute comprised of lemon, peppermint, rosechips, and raspberry.⁶ The most ardent of female rebels went as far as to issue manifestos in local newspapers, a daring move considering that mention in the press could be social poison for aristocratic women.⁷ Perhaps the most well-known of these manifestos, printed in a February 1770 issue of the Boston Evening Post, featured the names of “upwards of 300 Mistresses of Families, in which Number the Ladies of the highest Rank and Influence” who had pledged to abstain from the consumption of tea.⁸
After the 1773 Tea Act, the English assumed that these acts of distaff recalcitrance would stop.⁹ But they were sorely mistaken. Already distrustful of the British, American colonists interpreted the Tea Act, which sought to lower tea costs by eliminating superfluous merchant middlemen, as a manipulative ploy to crush foreign competition and establish an unfair monopoly on tea.¹⁰ As before, women revolted — but this time even more aggressively. Upon hearing about the Act, a group of ladies in Charleston launched a campaign “to obtain the assent of every Mistress of a Family” to rebuff the “baneful Herb,” while women in Wilmington, North Carolina held demonstrations in which they burned their tea in public.¹¹ Later, in the fall of 1774, more than fifty women in Edenton, North Carolina gathered to reject the “pernicious custom of drinking tea,”¹² constituting themselves as the famous Edenton Ladies’ Patriotic Guild.¹³
Between the late 1760s and the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, women-led efforts precipitated a nearly two-thirds drop in tea consumption in the colonies¹⁴ as women’s civic actions garnered recognition — and validation — in the larger public realm: “Yes ladies,” affirmed a South Carolina Presbyterian minister in 1769, “You have the power more than all your committees and Congress, to strike the Stroke, and make the Hills and Plains of America clap their hands.”¹⁵ Across the pond, the English showed no mercy in satirizing these women with misogynistic cartoons and political essays, mocking them as “formidable” Amazons who appear masculinized, digressive, uncontrollable, and downright stupid.¹⁶ One particularly derogatory cartoon, the “Edenton Tea Party,” caricatured the members of the Edenton Ladies’ Patriotic Guild as hideous monsters (disturbingly, the only attractive member of the Guild appears to be fondled by a young man as she takes up a pen to sign the pledge).¹⁷
It is crazy to think that, nearly 250 years after the “Edenton Tea Party” cartoon, Alex Morgan was similarly criminalized for her tea-drinking gesture. Tea, admittedly, is an elemental part of Britain’s historical and cultural fabric. Since the 1662 union of King Charles II and Portugal’s tea-drinking Catherine of Braganza (a cultural icon of her day), the beverage has for centuries enchanted the British people as their country’s emblem of refinement and sophistication. In 1946, English writer George Orwell famously described the beverage as “one of the mainstays of civilization in this country,” while Winston Churchill claimed it to be as indispensable to Britain’s victory in World War II as bullets. Today, people in the UK consume more than 60 billion cups of tea each year.
Despite this deep cultural connection, the intense reaction surrounding Morgan’s post-goal gesture seems to suggest something far deeper and far more disturbing than hurt feelings around a beverage, no matter how beloved it is. While Morgan’s stunt could be feasibly seen as insensitive or even a tad bumptious, it in no way warrants the vitriol she received given the context of the way soccer is, and always has been, played by men. Not unlike the “Edenton Tea Party” cartoon, critiques of Morgan have been disproportionate, misguided, and ill-directed, unfairly making her out to be some sort of callous, exploitative villain for doing something much more innocuous than what male soccer players do all the time. “There is some sort of double standard for females in sports,” Morgan said in response to criticism after the match, “to feel like we have to be humble in our successes and have to celebrate but not too much…it always needs to be [in] a limited fashion.”
While Morgan’s stunt could be feasibly seen as insensitive or even a tad bumptious, it in no way warrants the vitriol it received given the context of the way soccer is, and always has been, played by men.
While this year’s Women’s World Cup signaled how far women have come, the reaction to Morgan’s benign tea-sipping gesture suggests that, unfortunately, we still have a long way to go until our accomplishments are universally welcomed and our behavior is fairly evaluated.
And that, my friends, is really the tea.
[1] Berkin, Carol. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence (New York, New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 20.
[2] Mays, Dorothy. Women in Early America: Struggle, Survival, and Freedom in a New World (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2004), 133.
[3] Depauw, Linda Grant. Founding Mothers: Women of America in the Revolutionary Era (New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 156.
[4] Mays. Women in Early America: Struggle, Survival, and Freedom in a New World, 133.
[5] Berkin. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence, 20.
[6] Mays. Women in Early America: Struggle, Survival, and Freedom in a New World, 51.
[7] Berkin. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence, 15.
[8] Berkin. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence, 15.
[9] Berkin. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence, 20.
[10] Berkin. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence, 20.
[11] Mays. Women in Early America: Struggle, Survival, and Freedom in a New World, 51-52.
[12] Depauw. Founding Mothers: Women of America in the Revolutionary Era, 159.
[13] Berkin. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence, 21.
[14] Mays. Women in Early America: Struggle, Survival, and Freedom in a New World, 51.
[15] Berkin. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence, 21.
[16] Berkin. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence, 22.
[17] Depauw. Founding Mothers: Women of America in the Revolutionary Era, 159–60.
