"Why Letting Women Take Tea Breaks Was Once Considered Dangerous "

"sipping tea was once thought of as a reckless, suspicious act, linked to revolutionary feminism.

Huh? Well, the feminist complaints came from 19th century, upper class Irish critics who argued that peasant women shouldn't be wasting their time — and limited resources — on tea. If women had time to sit down and enjoy a tea break, this must mean they were ignoring their domestic duties and instead, perhaps, opening the door to political engagement or even rebellion...

In a paper published in the journal Literature and History, O'Connell explores the angst about tea by combing through popular pamphlets — or short works of fiction — published in the 1800s. The pamphlets were published by reformers who were trying to weave tales of morality and clean-living into story form...

The reformers' campaign against tea took on another moral outrage: slavery. Since tea was typically sweetened with sugar at the time, reformers in Ireland tried to convince people that tea drinking was akin to drinking the blood of slaves, who were forced to work the plantations where sugar was produced.(Many prominent British intellectuals of the 19th century, including the Romantic British poet Percy Shelley, also boycotted sugar in their tea for this reason.)"

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/08/11/431394045/why-letting-women-take-tea-breaks-was-once-considered-dangerous?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150811

I find this interestingly complicated. To be clear, this is about British women - the women who were slaves were not involves in this thought. And opposition to the economic system based on slave labor got caught up in a moment of repression of British women. It's frustrating to see these times when movements are pitted against each other, as though the activists ought to be enemies.