Learning to be Graceful: Tea in Early Modern Guides for Women's Edification

Abstract

The focus of this paper is the eighteenth and nineteenth century popular discourse on women's tea practice in guides for women's edification. It argues that in these commercially produced texts we find evidence of the dissemination of information on tea culture to a new social group, namely, wealthy commoner women. Thus, we see that with economic growth came new opportunities for commoner women to participate in cultural practices associated with the elite. Tea was a particularly significant cultural practice as it taught women etiquette and manners. Through learning tea, commoner women could learn to comport themselves in a manner associated with those of higher status. It was a way of displaying their, and their family's, accumulation of capital, both social and economic, and also a way to potentially raise their status through marriage. This early modern discourse on women's tea laid the foundations for the growth of women's tea in modern Japan, a development made possible by the flexibility of the status system as it affected women.

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