Hannah

“I would say I was raised very feminist. The family has a double-barreled surname because my folks hyphenated their names to negotiate the whole names and marriage thing. (Pro tip: don’t hyphenate – people will assume you’re really posh, and if both names are unusual you’ll spend the rest of your life spelling it out to people.)

“I always identified with feminism and was never scared of the word.  I was brought up to believe I could do anything I wanted and my mom made a point of giving me and my brother equal access to all types of toys – like having boy dolls as well as girl dolls. She also always named sexism where she saw it. This was a real gift because growing up I saw sexism as a bad thing and a lazy assumption, rather than just the status quo.

“As I’ve grown up I’ve realised retrospectively just how rad my mom was – she went to Greenham Common, she bought Spare Rib magazine, she had rainbow shoelaces (which I’ve stolen) – but also I’m profoundly grateful that she never ever let me become fucked up about food and body image, or to correlate body-image with self-worth. I really feel like I’ve dodged a massive bullet with that one and am a lot better off than many women because of it.

Love you, Mom (now quit pestering me about grandkids).”

Rai

“My Mum didn’t really raise me in a ‘feminist way’, but the cumulative actions of my parents together has helped to shape my views on the world and, more specifically the concept of equality.  As I understand it, my Mum took time off work to look after me when I was very little and after my brother was born too, but when he was old enough, Mum and Dad essentially swapped.  Mum went back to working in the City and Dad became a househusband right up until I was 12 years old.  Having a mother who worked full time in London and a stay-at-home dad is bound to have an effect (insert some philosophical/psychological insight into strong independent female figures and role models), but that wasn’t the only thing.

“My parents told me once that before they had me (their first child) they sat down and made the time to discuss and agree that there would be no greater importance placed on one parent or the other based on their gender.  So if Mum was looking after us and we did something naughty, there would be no ‘just you wait until your Father gets home!’ threat of punishment… you just got punished by whichever parent was there.  Or, indeed, my Grandma when we lived with her for a while (who is also a huge influence on my feminist tendencies).”

Viktoriya

“Let’s be clear on one thing: my mother (who is Bulgarian) is a farmer’s daughter. Whatever else she became later on, she can still kill and pluck a chicken, cure many common ailments with mysterious herbs, and pick tobacco leaves with her bare hands (no lie: she still has the scars). Of course, that’s not all she is. For one thing, when the local doctor decided to try bloodletting to cure my infant aunt’s colic, my mother snatched her from the doctor’s hands and ran away with her, reasoning that the doctor was a fool and that at nine years old she was clearly more qualified to treat her sister. (Who was fine, by the way, due in no small measure to my mother’s interference.) By the time my mother was thirteen, she had outgrown her local village school, and so she simply packed her bags and moved out of the family home to a nearby city to continue her education.

“At eighteen, when the rest of her friends were getting married and having children, she stayed resolutely single and enrolled at a university instead. A few years later she scandalised polite society by taking up with an older divorcee who – shockingly – was both Armenian and a dissident. When he set off to sea in that dreadfully romantic way that makes sense only in films, she ran the household, raised two children, led the local community group and dealt with the persistent interest of the secret police. She taught me to cook, and to sew, and to knit, and explained that while it was nice to see my father every once in a while, fundamentally I’d have to be prepared to run a household – a community – a country – all by myself.

(The one thing she ever forbade me to do was to become an accountant. Her reason? “Boring.”)

“In this different country, with Communism a fading memory from far away, my mother blends into the background, no different from any of the millions of women in our cities and villages. But when the light is right, and if you know how to look, she is still the twenty-year-old in the pictures: the one with the long hair and the wide smile, who shimmied down the side of a building to sneak away from the secret police and escape, laughing, on the back of her dissident lover’s motorcycle.

I think we can all be grateful she decided to be a mother, rather than an Evil Overlady.

As for the accountancy? I hate to say it, but I should have listened to my mother.”

International Women's Day parade in traditional dress in Po, Burkina Faso, 8 March 2009. Photo writer's own

One of my oldest memories as a small child in Bulgaria is making a fuss over my mother on International Women’s Day. I remember making cards in school, and learning poems, and generally being really impatient to grow up so I would get to have a fuss made over me, too. Sure, there was Children’s Day, but it wasn’t a patch on Women’s Day. They got a bloody parade. A parade! Soon I, too, would grow up, and get to have a parade. Or possibly a statue. I hadn’t decided.

Of course, my innocent dreams of grandeur were all for nought. A few years later we moved to the UK, and Women’s Day was banished to a vague memory of communism and its weird ideas. I got Mothering Sunday instead. The first time I opted for Mothering Sunday flowers and brunch instead of the usual Women’s Day, my mother thought I’d forgotten and burst into tears. Explaining I’d switched allegiance to a movable feast instead of a fixed day didn’t seem to win me many fans. And my father seemed relieved that he didn’t have to observe it, since, he pointed out, she was his wife and not his mother.

Now, look. Those first tremulous years of transition were admittedly ropey, and it took a while for everyone to settle into their assigned roles. Mum yields to brunches and jewellery more easily now, and hasn’t demanded a formal poem or performative dance for the longest time. And my brother just signs his name next to mine on the card. But that’s not really the point.

I’m starting to think we shouldn’t have made the transition in the first place. International Women’s Day was a celebration of being female, and an acknowledgement of women’s roles and contributions to society. One of the famous women we learned about in school was Valentina Tereshkova (sans tragic end), and I remember presenting my school teacher with a carefully constructed posy to acknowledge her position as educator. Admittedly, this was all orchestrated and ultimately about the glory of communism, so there are problems with it. But despite all that, I took from those few years of observing Women’s Day a sense of pride at being female, and an impatience to be a woman.

So let’s look at Mothering Sunday. Where to start? It’s a familial observance – you’re nice to your own mother to make up for setting the kitchen on fire that one time, and 24 hours of labour et cetera – and I’m under no obligation to be nice to any mothers I meet on my way home. Especially if they’re pushing those 4×4 buggies. Also, it’s a presents-and-flowers day, where you buy gifts to show appreciation for being born and suckled and generally not dropped on your head. No one is actually expecting you to do anything differently the next day, your duties discharged with a pink book on frills and a wilted bouquet.

Finally – and perhaps damningly – it only acknowledges one aspect of femininity. Mothering Sunday elevates mothering to the pinnacle of womanhood. What happens if your mother – much as you love her – just isn’t very good at this mothering malarkey? She tries her best, but curing cancer or trekking across the Arctic takes up a lot of time. I’m betting she feels a little silly looking at that cat illustration now.

There are other problems. What about other women you owe great debts of gratitude to? What about the grandmothers, aunts, stepmothers, big sisters, best friends, teachers, mentors and supporters who cheerlead you throughout your life? Maybe we should have a separate day for each of them. I, for one, am looking forward to observing Second Cousin Twice Removed Day. They always threw the best parties.

I find it problematic to have motherhood as the only aspect of womanhood that is nationally acknowledged. I find it problematic to have motherhood as a system of gratitude predicated upon familial links, rather than as an acknowledgement by society as a whole. Finally, I find it bloody annoying that my own accomplishments will not be acknowledged or celebrated by anyone, least of all in a parade. Quite frankly, sometimes I think that I – and all the amazing women I see around me – deserve a parade. And why not? It happens elsewhere in the world. Two years ago I was in the small town of Po, in southern Burkina Faso, on 8^th March. The reason I was wandering around the country and not busy with an abacus is because International Women’s Day is a Bank Holiday there. And not just there.

Here comes the parade... International Women's Day parade begins in Po, Burkina Faso, 8 March 2009. Photo writer's own

In China, Russia and large parts of Africa, International Women’s Day still flourishes.  Even in places such as Iran there are still people eager to celebrate women’s contributions and to show solidarity.  There are still parades, and recitals, and girls waiting impatiently to grow up and have a day to be proud of being female. You could argue that, in the UK, many women would feel proud of being female much more often than that. You could point towards exam results, or women’s achievements, or women’s contribution to UK society.

You’d be wrong, I think. Of course, women achieve all of these things in the UK, and more. But when are these achievements acknowledged or celebrated?

When they give birth – and, a few months later, get their first pink Mother’s Day card.

Keep your cards and glitter pens. Bring back the parades.

Carry your banner with pride: International Women's Day parade

TEA

Make tea, child, said my kind mamma. Sit by me, love, and make tea.

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1747)

Ah, the Joke Post comes upon us at last. T is for ‘t’… very droll. I lift a cup to that. But fie! Have we learned nothing on this lexical journey? First and foremost, tea was not always pronounced as we currently say it: when it first appeared in English in 1601 it was ‘taaaaay‘ and often written tay (like the modern French thé, a bit). It is not quite clear when and why the shift to ‘ti’ happened, but, then, few things are as easy to lose sight of as pronunciation (how many people remember that Keats was a Cockney?)

Shall I be mother? Catherine of Braganza, painted by Jacob Huysmans.

Tea, of course, has the additional complication that it is not an English word (although what is?) – it came from the Dutch thee, in turn from Malay and, eventually, Chinese Amoy dialect: t’e, or the Mandarin ch’a. Woven into the geographical etymology, then, is a legacy of import history: around the mid-seventeenth century we procured our tea from the Dutch, who imported it from Malaysia and, ultimately, China. What exactly were they importing? Why, tea‘s first definition, of course: ‘the leaves of the tea-plant, usually in a dried and prepared state for making the drink’. In this form, tea began with a queen, and quickly became every eighteenth-century Cosmo girl’s first route of seduction.

Brew and Thunder.

But first – the drink. ‘Made by infusing these leaves in boiling water, having a somewhat bitter and aromatic flavour, and acting as a moderate stimulant’ – in this sense, the word tea is first recorded around 1601, so some trendsetters must have been aware of it before the widespread importing of the later seventeenth century, when tea really came into its own: Samuel Pepys tried it in 1660, and a couple of years later it found a celebrity backer in the be-farthingaled shape of the Portuguese queen consort to Charles II, Catherine of Braganza (remember her?). So, in England at least, tea was from the beginning tending towards the female of the species.

Catherine’s tea-drinking was partly to do with Portugal’s colonial links with Asia, but also with her temperament: solemn and pious, she initially had trouble fitting into the Protestant English court and her preference for a ‘moderate stimulant’ over the ales and beers otherwise drunk marked one of many departures. But tea was quickly owning its stimulating qualities and being marketed as a ‘tonic’, a civilized alternative to alcohol capable of soothing aches’n’pains and spurring on mental capacities: a zeitgeist for the intellectual impetus of the early Enlightenment – as against Charles II’s well-known debauchery – and, in fact, a ‘panacea‘:

Hail, Queen of Plants, Pride of Elysian Bow’rs!
How shall we speak thy complicated Powr’s?
Thou wondrous Panacea, to asswage
The Calentures of Youth’s fermenting rage,
And animate the freezing veins of age.

Nahum Tate, from Panacea: A Poem Upon Tea (1700)

But what started out as a Portuguese import became a matter of English national identity, and by the next century London’s East India Company had established a monopoly on trade, controlling imports into Britain (and thus, prices), using its extensive trade links with Queen Catherine’s dowry –then-Bombay – and the East Indies, and Asia. It was thus that the English turned not into a nation of coffee drinkers, but to devotees of the ‘Queen of Plants’. And a queen she certainly was, and not entirely distinct from the maternal and oft-secluded Queen Anne, who dramatically reduced the size of the English court and inspired a new fashion for calm domesticity and politeness. Thus, the bustling male-dominated coffee-houses, but also a more feminine fix at home…

Five Leaves Left.

So in 1738 tea came to mean not just some withered leaf, but also an opportunity for socialising! Hurrah! To be precise, tea became ‘a meal or social entertainment at which tea is served; especially an ordinary afternoon or evening meal, at which the usual beverage is tea’. The fact that it could connote an ‘ordinary afternoon meal’ made tea a convenient beverage to offer casual social callers, although it was also, of course, a beverage that demanded a whole host of conspicuous purchases: a full tea-set and the crucial Other Element – sugar. Thus your tea-table represented Britain’s colonial interests off in China and India to the tea-side, and Africa and the East Indies to the sugar-side, with all the attendant horrors of the emergent slave trade conveniently swept under the (Persian) rug.

Tea. Photo par Hodge.

The conspicuous consumption tea represented was exacerbated by its price: before mass importation in the mid-century had driven costs down, the leaf itself was fixed at so extortionate a price (a bargain in 1680 was 30s a pound) as to necessitate the purchase of a lockable tea-chest, which would become the responsibility first of the lady of the house, and, when age-appropriate, of her daughter. The woman who held the key to the tea-chest was, naturally, also the woman who made the tea – thus ‘Shall I be mother?’, a phrase of uncertain origin. One theory I came across was that it is a Victorian idiom related to the phenomenon of women unable to breastfeed naturally using teapot spouts to convey milk to their infant instead. OH THE SYMBOLISM.

Whatever the phrase’s specific origins, it’s certainly true that from tea‘s domestic beginnings onwards whole family power structures could hang on which woman this ‘mother’ was. Alas, London’s major galleries forbid image reproduction (WAAH), but if you turn to your handouts,  you will see this in action. This is the Tyers family: that’s Mr Tyers on the left, and his son just down from one of the universities. His daughter, on the far right, is about to be married (she’s putting her gloves on to go out – out of the door and out of the family). Her role as tea-maker has, in consequence, passed onto her younger sister, who now sits as squarely in the middle of the family portrait as she does in the family sphere. Conversely, in Clarissa, when the heroine angers her parents they sack her from her tea-task and grotesquely divide it up among other family members (“My heart was up at my mouth. I did not know what to do with myself”, she recalls, distraught. I WANTED TO MAKE TEA!).

And she feeds you tea and oranges…

Of course, while assigning the tea-making to your daughter could be a loving gesture of trust, it also pimped her marriageability: it requires a cool head and calm demeanour to remember five-plus milk’n’sugar preferences, judge the strength of the tea and pour it, all the while making small-talk and remaining attentive to your guests. Add to this the weighty responsibility of locking the tea away from thieving servants and you have the management skills of housewifery in miniature. It also showed off physical charms: poise, posture, the elegant turn of a wrist, a beautifully framed bosom. To take this momentarily out of the salon, no respectable punter would get down in an eighteenth-century brothel without first taking tea with the girls: Fanny Hill spends at least as much time drinking tea as (That’s enough – Ed), and, of course, this kind of performative tea-ritual femininity is a mainstay in the professional life of the Japanese geisha.

So, along with its identity as a colonial mainstay in Britain’s trading life, tea in its origins is also something specifically feminine: a kind of Muse inspiring intellectual greatness, a Queen to be worshipped as a symbol of Britain’s health and power, and a key element in the women’s domestic lives. It could be stimulating, relaxing and seductive, but, as would become disastrously clear, it was always political.

NEXT WEEK: U is for Uterus