Surprisingly, one thing you wouldn’t always find in a tea room was tea.
March 11, 2019 12:14 AM Subscribe
The Top Secret Feminist History of Tearooms: As a young girl, I read books like the Nancy Drew mysteries—the characters were always popping into tea rooms for lunch. To a modern reader, tea rooms conjured visions of crumpets and china, but when the books were published (the first in 1930), mentioning a tea room was meant to communicate to the reader that Nancy and her friends were independent women who could eat out without a man to escort them. While most women think nothing of dining out without a man now, tea rooms played a major role in bringing about this phenomenon.
(SL JSTOR Daily)
Mod note: One deleted, and a quick note: yes there are other slang meanings for "tea room," but let's not derail this thread, please.
posted by taz (staff) at 4:41 AM on March 11, 2019 [12 favorites]
posted by taz (staff) at 4:41 AM on March 11, 2019 [12 favorites]
There is a "nut and jelly sandwich" on the menu in Sudbury, MA. I feel so affirmed in my love of PB&J: More Sophisticated Than You Think.
posted by allthinky at 5:46 AM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by allthinky at 5:46 AM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
I recall as a child visiting the Clara Louise Tea Room in Plainfield, N.J. with my mother and her lady friends, in 1959. It was a big bright sunny place, with a location in the back of a main street building. This room. Not much outside signage, you just had to know it was there. It closed in the early 60s.
posted by beagle at 6:05 AM on March 11, 2019 [9 favorites]
posted by beagle at 6:05 AM on March 11, 2019 [9 favorites]
I've been to the Willow Tea Room in Glasgow, but I never realised this cultural history! I can recommend having high tea there though.
posted by cendawanita at 6:49 AM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by cendawanita at 6:49 AM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
Nothing makes me feel more grateful to be living in our current terrible world than reading about the past.
What was the impetus for so many women to start tea rooms? Much of it had to do with women’s inability to dine publicly unaccompanied in regular restaurants, according to the Americanist Cynthia Brandimarte’s article, “‘To Make the Whole World Homelike’: Gender, Space, and America’s Tea Room Movement.” The tavern and hotel scenes were dominated by men. Women weren’t welcome in some places at all, and only with a man in others. The tea room, so often either a home or a homelike environment, gave women chances to dine out—whether she was a working woman on a lunch break, taking a break from shopping, or touring with friends in the newly invented automobile.
Infuriating.
posted by rue72 at 7:08 AM on March 11, 2019 [15 favorites]
What was the impetus for so many women to start tea rooms? Much of it had to do with women’s inability to dine publicly unaccompanied in regular restaurants, according to the Americanist Cynthia Brandimarte’s article, “‘To Make the Whole World Homelike’: Gender, Space, and America’s Tea Room Movement.” The tavern and hotel scenes were dominated by men. Women weren’t welcome in some places at all, and only with a man in others. The tea room, so often either a home or a homelike environment, gave women chances to dine out—whether she was a working woman on a lunch break, taking a break from shopping, or touring with friends in the newly invented automobile.
Infuriating.
posted by rue72 at 7:08 AM on March 11, 2019 [15 favorites]
Women weren’t welcome in some places at all, and only with a man in others.
Indeed. When I was about 12 or 13 in 1963 or so, I sometimes accompanied my father on his commute into Manhattan, just to hang out. His secretary would take me out to lunch to a place that had a basement-level "men's grill". Without me, she would not be admitted there.
posted by beagle at 7:54 AM on March 11, 2019 [19 favorites]
Indeed. When I was about 12 or 13 in 1963 or so, I sometimes accompanied my father on his commute into Manhattan, just to hang out. His secretary would take me out to lunch to a place that had a basement-level "men's grill". Without me, she would not be admitted there.
posted by beagle at 7:54 AM on March 11, 2019 [19 favorites]
Years ago, I knew a man who had been the "head porter" at Harvard University. He would tell some great stories about the 1940s/50s.
One of his jobs was to man the freshman dining hall. First, he would grab some of the students by the neck and make sure that they were wearing a necktie.
Then, he said, women were not allowed in without an escort. If a man's fellow students approved of his guest, they would tap their glasses with a fork. If they did not approve, they would not do anything.
posted by Melismata at 8:08 AM on March 11, 2019 [4 favorites]
One of his jobs was to man the freshman dining hall. First, he would grab some of the students by the neck and make sure that they were wearing a necktie.
Then, he said, women were not allowed in without an escort. If a man's fellow students approved of his guest, they would tap their glasses with a fork. If they did not approve, they would not do anything.
posted by Melismata at 8:08 AM on March 11, 2019 [4 favorites]
I'm going to need a recipe for cheese dreams!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:33 AM on March 11, 2019
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:33 AM on March 11, 2019
I recall as a child visiting the Clara Louise Tea Room in Plainfield, N.J. with my mother and her lady friends, in 1959. It was a big bright sunny place, with a location in the back of a main street building. This room. Not much outside signage, you just had to know it was there. It closed in the early 60s.
Ah, thanks for sharing this cool detail! I grew up in North Plainfield with family going back in the area several generations and it's cool to imagine my Plainfieldian grandma going to that space. Well, one of them. The other one was Jewish which I suspect, though I'm not sure, might have changed her social spaces somewhat.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 8:51 AM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
Ah, thanks for sharing this cool detail! I grew up in North Plainfield with family going back in the area several generations and it's cool to imagine my Plainfieldian grandma going to that space. Well, one of them. The other one was Jewish which I suspect, though I'm not sure, might have changed her social spaces somewhat.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 8:51 AM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
"Cheese dreams" in my (UK) experience are not like the one in the article, but consist of leftover cheese sandwiches from someone's packed lunch, that have gone slightly stale, and are therefore fried in order to be rejuvenated at tea time. Having condiments in there (probably marmite or pickle) would be a fine and normal thing.
posted by quacks like a duck at 8:52 AM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by quacks like a duck at 8:52 AM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
This article is interesting to me in the same way as the history of the ladies' lounges attached to public restrooms, and for many of the same reasons.
posted by merriment at 9:35 AM on March 11, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by merriment at 9:35 AM on March 11, 2019 [3 favorites]
There was a cartoonist at the time who did a one-panel of a man who is sitting at a table in a tea room being very uncomfortable and awkward at being the only man in the place. A subtext I didn't realize until now is that none of the women were paying any attention to him at all, all being absorbed to conversing with each other.
posted by King Sky Prawn at 9:43 AM on March 11, 2019 [9 favorites]
posted by King Sky Prawn at 9:43 AM on March 11, 2019 [9 favorites]
I'm pretty sure the tea room phenomena started a lot earlier in Britain but was limited to urban areas where upper class women might need to rest before going home. At that time she wouldn't go out alone, but might go out with a maid, and might need a place to restore herself.
The other place women went was a church. Churches however did not provide refreshment, but were a place that women without male escorts could take a break for awhile.
The tea rooms in Britain became a huge thing with the bicycle craze. Women wheelers needed places to stop. They were often situated around a private well, and got their reputation because the water was good - in the days before treated water a lot of the water was hard, or silty or otherwise not terribly nice. It wasn't a matter of unsafe, although that was a feature of importance, it was a matter of wanting water without an off taste. Cyclists got very thirsty and were reluctant to drink out of a slimy horse trough, so they passed the word around that there is a woman in the house at the bend of Cotterswall lane just past the orchard who will let you have a drink from her well and the water is really good and pure, and the next thing you know the obliging soul who lived at the house was being asked if she could sell sandwiches.
One feature of these places was that you couldn't go inside - that made it safer for the travelers and for the woman offering water. If you needed to lean your wheeler up against a tree and rest in the shade for awhile there was the orchard.
Women in those days had cast iron high capacity bladders. A man could let go against a wall, or could knock on a door and ask to use their outhouse, or just slip around the back and use one without permission, but a woman could not do that. She had to find a sufficiently secluded bit of shrubbery. Some women wore divided drawers under a skirt so they didn't have to lift and unfasten anything, but when riding a bicycle you wanted all the protection and padding you could get, and of course if you were on your period you had to have something or the mess in your petticoats was appalling, so an extremely secluded bit of shrubbery was necessary.
Unfortunately secluded bits of shrubbery were where women might get accosted and if something happened there it was your own fault for going somewhere secluded.
So the tea room with an outhouse was a safe place to tend to bodily functions was exceedingly helpful, and cyclists would plan their routes according to where they could stop.
Tea room as a term for a safe place for the marginalized to go to deal with physical needs where they would meet with out harassment sprang from this. But in Britain they weren't called rooms, they were called tea shops, or referred to as 'serving tea'. Children, (who were astonishingly free range in those days; eight miles from home for a twelve year old being nothing out of the ordinary) also frequented these places, having many of the same needs for safe stopping places that women did. However they often went for ginger beer, which was served in stoneware bottles which you had to leave behind. An independent woman could no longer be an ale wife in the days of licensing but she could brew non alcoholic beer at home and sell that. They might also serve lemonade - usually flat, weak and tasting very old -which was a lot closer to gatorade than syrup, or a raspberry vinegar. But ginger beer was the one that the kids really loved. Spruce beer was another choice, in areas where spruce grew.
Towards the end of the 1800's, young people with bicycles went everywhere, and you might get a party of children, or just girls, or both sexes, who would take multi-day trips. They had their own culture and network, slang and equipment. This was expedited by the post - with five deliveries a day in the larger metropolitain areas it was perfectly possible to send a letter off to a woman you had heard of that provided beds for respectable children, with an address like "Dixon's Farm, North of Snowshill, Cotswold, UK, get a letter back confirming the next day, take off the day after and drop letters twice in the morning on your way towards Snowshill informing your parents of your progress, and they would get your letters back before you actually reached your destination in the evening. The postman who did rural delivery and pick up, did his rounds on a bicycle also, of course.
Many British middle class fathers were involved in the armed forces or administrating the Empire. Often their wives went with them as her primary duty was to her husband, not her children, and the children were sent to schools or to live with relatives in Britain. So if father was a naval officer posted to Malta, the wife would live in Malta, he would be at sea and the children back in Britain. That was part of why they had so incredibly much freedom. During school holidays you had to send the children somewhere, and where ever it was they went there on their own if they were remotely old enough to do so.
Pleasure jaunts were a big thing. One could only sit in the house reading or being read to for so long. It was vastly exciting if the church showed slides of the Holy Land. A modern person would have been unutterably bored. Rides in the country were prescribed by doctors for many different sicknesses, as was going to the seaside, or going to the countryside. Even today the tradition lingers of taking walking tours. Everyone went on trips. There were excursion clubs for the poor to contribute a mite every week so that they could take a group trip (with tea!) come the Queen's birthday or the newly declared August Bank Holiday.
Another result of women's increasing independence and the hostility of the public sphere was the YWCA. the Young Women's Christian Association, which provided a safe place for good women to go, and which was a respectable place to meet but also to get a bed for the night, were you enterprising enough to want to do overnight trips. The YMCA was founded first, although men could always find a place to get a bed. The problem before the YMCA was the same as with youth hostels now, where in many areas they provide housing for the homeless and the marginalized, and so were not a good influence, and might not even provide a bed for you to doss down on, or if they did your mother would not let you into the house when you got home out of the realistic anxiety that you could be bringing back fleas, mites, bedbugs or scabies. And don't even mention TB.
It was much better than it had been just a few decades before. One very early Victorian hostel in London actually only provided a cellar strung with ropes to lean on, expecting you to stand all night while you rested and sheltered during the winter. The combined body heat provided the heat in this unheated cellar. They woke all the stupefied unfortunates up by untying one end of the rope!
posted by Jane the Brown at 10:09 AM on March 11, 2019 [110 favorites]
The other place women went was a church. Churches however did not provide refreshment, but were a place that women without male escorts could take a break for awhile.
The tea rooms in Britain became a huge thing with the bicycle craze. Women wheelers needed places to stop. They were often situated around a private well, and got their reputation because the water was good - in the days before treated water a lot of the water was hard, or silty or otherwise not terribly nice. It wasn't a matter of unsafe, although that was a feature of importance, it was a matter of wanting water without an off taste. Cyclists got very thirsty and were reluctant to drink out of a slimy horse trough, so they passed the word around that there is a woman in the house at the bend of Cotterswall lane just past the orchard who will let you have a drink from her well and the water is really good and pure, and the next thing you know the obliging soul who lived at the house was being asked if she could sell sandwiches.
One feature of these places was that you couldn't go inside - that made it safer for the travelers and for the woman offering water. If you needed to lean your wheeler up against a tree and rest in the shade for awhile there was the orchard.
Women in those days had cast iron high capacity bladders. A man could let go against a wall, or could knock on a door and ask to use their outhouse, or just slip around the back and use one without permission, but a woman could not do that. She had to find a sufficiently secluded bit of shrubbery. Some women wore divided drawers under a skirt so they didn't have to lift and unfasten anything, but when riding a bicycle you wanted all the protection and padding you could get, and of course if you were on your period you had to have something or the mess in your petticoats was appalling, so an extremely secluded bit of shrubbery was necessary.
Unfortunately secluded bits of shrubbery were where women might get accosted and if something happened there it was your own fault for going somewhere secluded.
So the tea room with an outhouse was a safe place to tend to bodily functions was exceedingly helpful, and cyclists would plan their routes according to where they could stop.
Tea room as a term for a safe place for the marginalized to go to deal with physical needs where they would meet with out harassment sprang from this. But in Britain they weren't called rooms, they were called tea shops, or referred to as 'serving tea'. Children, (who were astonishingly free range in those days; eight miles from home for a twelve year old being nothing out of the ordinary) also frequented these places, having many of the same needs for safe stopping places that women did. However they often went for ginger beer, which was served in stoneware bottles which you had to leave behind. An independent woman could no longer be an ale wife in the days of licensing but she could brew non alcoholic beer at home and sell that. They might also serve lemonade - usually flat, weak and tasting very old -which was a lot closer to gatorade than syrup, or a raspberry vinegar. But ginger beer was the one that the kids really loved. Spruce beer was another choice, in areas where spruce grew.
Towards the end of the 1800's, young people with bicycles went everywhere, and you might get a party of children, or just girls, or both sexes, who would take multi-day trips. They had their own culture and network, slang and equipment. This was expedited by the post - with five deliveries a day in the larger metropolitain areas it was perfectly possible to send a letter off to a woman you had heard of that provided beds for respectable children, with an address like "Dixon's Farm, North of Snowshill, Cotswold, UK, get a letter back confirming the next day, take off the day after and drop letters twice in the morning on your way towards Snowshill informing your parents of your progress, and they would get your letters back before you actually reached your destination in the evening. The postman who did rural delivery and pick up, did his rounds on a bicycle also, of course.
Many British middle class fathers were involved in the armed forces or administrating the Empire. Often their wives went with them as her primary duty was to her husband, not her children, and the children were sent to schools or to live with relatives in Britain. So if father was a naval officer posted to Malta, the wife would live in Malta, he would be at sea and the children back in Britain. That was part of why they had so incredibly much freedom. During school holidays you had to send the children somewhere, and where ever it was they went there on their own if they were remotely old enough to do so.
Pleasure jaunts were a big thing. One could only sit in the house reading or being read to for so long. It was vastly exciting if the church showed slides of the Holy Land. A modern person would have been unutterably bored. Rides in the country were prescribed by doctors for many different sicknesses, as was going to the seaside, or going to the countryside. Even today the tradition lingers of taking walking tours. Everyone went on trips. There were excursion clubs for the poor to contribute a mite every week so that they could take a group trip (with tea!) come the Queen's birthday or the newly declared August Bank Holiday.
Another result of women's increasing independence and the hostility of the public sphere was the YWCA. the Young Women's Christian Association, which provided a safe place for good women to go, and which was a respectable place to meet but also to get a bed for the night, were you enterprising enough to want to do overnight trips. The YMCA was founded first, although men could always find a place to get a bed. The problem before the YMCA was the same as with youth hostels now, where in many areas they provide housing for the homeless and the marginalized, and so were not a good influence, and might not even provide a bed for you to doss down on, or if they did your mother would not let you into the house when you got home out of the realistic anxiety that you could be bringing back fleas, mites, bedbugs or scabies. And don't even mention TB.
It was much better than it had been just a few decades before. One very early Victorian hostel in London actually only provided a cellar strung with ropes to lean on, expecting you to stand all night while you rested and sheltered during the winter. The combined body heat provided the heat in this unheated cellar. They woke all the stupefied unfortunates up by untying one end of the rope!
posted by Jane the Brown at 10:09 AM on March 11, 2019 [110 favorites]
I gather that Paul Freedman's book Ten Restaurants That Changed America included Schrafft's because it was a place where women could eat without a male escort.
posted by acrasis at 10:12 AM on March 11, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by acrasis at 10:12 AM on March 11, 2019 [1 favorite]
That looks like an intriguing read; thanks. One of my friends from the library field has branched out into all things food history and, amongst many things, is writing books in the area. One of which is on afternoon tea, but from a colonial, historical and political perspective; this is therefore one of my reading topics for the year (comments such as the one from Jane the Brown also very interesting).
As has been mentioned in other MetaFilter threads recently, our (English) history education at school in the 1980s was ... not great (woefully incomplete, often biased and slanted) ... so it's good to belatedly get a more accurate perspective on the origins and history of some of our culture, messy and not great though they oft turn out to be. Also strange, gradually realising how much you were lied to at school during formal education, but there you go.
posted by Wordshore at 10:56 AM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
As has been mentioned in other MetaFilter threads recently, our (English) history education at school in the 1980s was ... not great (woefully incomplete, often biased and slanted) ... so it's good to belatedly get a more accurate perspective on the origins and history of some of our culture, messy and not great though they oft turn out to be. Also strange, gradually realising how much you were lied to at school during formal education, but there you go.
posted by Wordshore at 10:56 AM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
I gather that Paul Freedman's book Ten Restaurants That Changed America included Schrafft's because it was a place where women could eat without a male escort.
The heroines of Joanna Russ's great feminist science fiction novel, The Female Man, visit Schrafft's:
Schrafft's is full of women. Men don't like places like this where the secret maintenance work of femininity is carried on, just as they turn green and bolt when you tell them medical events are occurring in your genito-urinary system.....I look around Schrafft's and wonde why women at their most genteel are so miserly; why is there no Four Seasons, no Maxim's, no Chambord, for women? Women are very strange about money, feudal almost: real Money is what you spend on the house and on yourself (except for your appearance): Magic Money is what you get men to spend on you. It takes a tremendous rearrangement of mental priorities for women to eat well, that is to spend money on their insides instead of their outsides. The Schrafft's hostess stands by the cashier's desk in her good black dress and sensible shoes; women left tothemselves are ugly, i.e. human, but Gentility has been interfering here.
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 11:03 AM on March 11, 2019 [4 favorites]
The heroines of Joanna Russ's great feminist science fiction novel, The Female Man, visit Schrafft's:
Schrafft's is full of women. Men don't like places like this where the secret maintenance work of femininity is carried on, just as they turn green and bolt when you tell them medical events are occurring in your genito-urinary system.....I look around Schrafft's and wonde why women at their most genteel are so miserly; why is there no Four Seasons, no Maxim's, no Chambord, for women? Women are very strange about money, feudal almost: real Money is what you spend on the house and on yourself (except for your appearance): Magic Money is what you get men to spend on you. It takes a tremendous rearrangement of mental priorities for women to eat well, that is to spend money on their insides instead of their outsides. The Schrafft's hostess stands by the cashier's desk in her good black dress and sensible shoes; women left tothemselves are ugly, i.e. human, but Gentility has been interfering here.
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 11:03 AM on March 11, 2019 [4 favorites]
Mid 1950's my family would visit the grandparents in Indianapolis. We'd often go downtown to LS Ayres Department Store where there was the requisite family oriented grill cafeteria in the basement. Upstairs was the much more formal (Table linen! Long gauzy drapery!) Ladies' Tea Room where 'Chicken Velvet Soup' was served. Definite delight for a small town girl!
Thanks for the history! And one more pre-programmed subliminal feminist nuance from Nancy Drew!
posted by Mesaverdian at 11:23 AM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
Thanks for the history! And one more pre-programmed subliminal feminist nuance from Nancy Drew!
posted by Mesaverdian at 11:23 AM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
Plus, as usual, but women have always...
Rural women, of course, produced almost all the food for their households every day, and could usually scramble up a short-term surplus. 19th c novels set in the US are full of people in unfamiliar country riding, or bicycling, or walking (some streetcars went a long way into the country) up to any well-kept farmhouse they can see and bargaining for a glass of milk, or a meal, or room and board for the night, for the week, or until a letter came back. Autobiographies and letter collections don't have so many people lost for a week, but it's totally normal to spend a recuperative week, season or year in some rural households' spare room. The rural households need currency for their rare big market interactions -- schooling, new machinery, buying a new field.
The earlier these are, the less anyone talks about decor -- cleanliness was difficult enough to achieve.
posted by clew at 11:32 AM on March 11, 2019 [8 favorites]
Rural women, of course, produced almost all the food for their households every day, and could usually scramble up a short-term surplus. 19th c novels set in the US are full of people in unfamiliar country riding, or bicycling, or walking (some streetcars went a long way into the country) up to any well-kept farmhouse they can see and bargaining for a glass of milk, or a meal, or room and board for the night, for the week, or until a letter came back. Autobiographies and letter collections don't have so many people lost for a week, but it's totally normal to spend a recuperative week, season or year in some rural households' spare room. The rural households need currency for their rare big market interactions -- schooling, new machinery, buying a new field.
The earlier these are, the less anyone talks about decor -- cleanliness was difficult enough to achieve.
posted by clew at 11:32 AM on March 11, 2019 [8 favorites]
The tea rooms in Britain became a huge thing with the bicycle craze. Women wheelers needed places to stop.
Teahouses, bicycles and kick ass feminist women going on bike adventures all in one post? I am dead. Maybe the Victorian era wasn't so bad for women after all.
BRB, hopping in time machine.
*crack* *poof*
Well, that totally sucked. Riding in a corset is bullshit.
The bicycling and tea was pretty good, though. So were the hat pins.
posted by loquacious at 12:15 PM on March 11, 2019 [10 favorites]
Teahouses, bicycles and kick ass feminist women going on bike adventures all in one post? I am dead. Maybe the Victorian era wasn't so bad for women after all.
BRB, hopping in time machine.
*crack* *poof*
Well, that totally sucked. Riding in a corset is bullshit.
The bicycling and tea was pretty good, though. So were the hat pins.
posted by loquacious at 12:15 PM on March 11, 2019 [10 favorites]
Not a tea room, but The Cafe Beaux Arts was a pre-prohibition bar for women drinking w/o male companions in NYC.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 6:06 PM on March 11, 2019
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 6:06 PM on March 11, 2019
I am delighted to discover that a California tea room, Muir's Tea Room [picture of interior] , has in the past hosted a Nancy Drew weekend tea service, complete with themed menu.
posted by Secret Sparrow at 9:50 AM on March 12, 2019 [1 favorite]
![[picture of interior]](http://muirstearoom.com/images/slideshow/muir_menu_hd1.jpg){kind=link}
posted by Secret Sparrow at 9:50 AM on March 12, 2019 [1 favorite]
Clew, you've just explained a major plot point of the Famous Five novels.
posted by (bra) at 8:44 PM on March 12, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by (bra) at 8:44 PM on March 12, 2019 [3 favorites]
I also commend to you all this excellent previous post from julen about how the bicycle emancipated Victorian women.
And (bra), that's exactly what I was thinking when I read clew's comment! I guess the Famous Five was set several decades after the Victorian era, but I think there's often a kind of time lag in these things, and not only in the sense that such customs often endure. I also think adult authors write about childhood as they remember it from their own younger years, or even a little earlier than that, as passed down to them as the ideal archtype of childhood, harkened back to by their parents. I often look back on aspects of The Beano as I read it in the 80s and think how it was still really depicting a 1930s childhood in many ways.
posted by penguin pie at 9:20 AM on March 13, 2019 [2 favorites]
And (bra), that's exactly what I was thinking when I read clew's comment! I guess the Famous Five was set several decades after the Victorian era, but I think there's often a kind of time lag in these things, and not only in the sense that such customs often endure. I also think adult authors write about childhood as they remember it from their own younger years, or even a little earlier than that, as passed down to them as the ideal archtype of childhood, harkened back to by their parents. I often look back on aspects of The Beano as I read it in the 80s and think how it was still really depicting a 1930s childhood in many ways.
posted by penguin pie at 9:20 AM on March 13, 2019 [2 favorites]
Gosh, there are a lot of Famous Five novels. Which plot point?
posted by clew at 11:00 AM on March 13, 2019
posted by clew at 11:00 AM on March 13, 2019
Which plot point?
Them turning up on the doorstep of random farms and being unquestioningly provided with generous provisions by ruddy-faced farmers’ wives. Though they were usually bedding down on piles of heather in tumble-down ruins rather than in farmers’ spare rooms.
And actually come to think of it I guess also the general plot point of kids going off on day-long or multi-day adventures without adult oversight is explained by Jane the Brown’s comment.
posted by penguin pie at 12:50 PM on March 13, 2019 [5 favorites]
Them turning up on the doorstep of random farms and being unquestioningly provided with generous provisions by ruddy-faced farmers’ wives. Though they were usually bedding down on piles of heather in tumble-down ruins rather than in farmers’ spare rooms.
And actually come to think of it I guess also the general plot point of kids going off on day-long or multi-day adventures without adult oversight is explained by Jane the Brown’s comment.
posted by penguin pie at 12:50 PM on March 13, 2019 [5 favorites]
Just want to share this event and speaker about feminism and liberation in adventure biking because it's totally relevant to this thread.
Presented by Tessa Hulls.
posted by loquacious at 9:38 AM on April 2, 2019
Presented by Tessa Hulls.
posted by loquacious at 9:38 AM on April 2, 2019
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These days, however, I think that no discussion of non-tea drinking activities that happen in tea rooms could avoid the ubiquitous habit of afternoon-tea-display-instagramming. I'm not sure Kate would have approved.
posted by rongorongo at 1:02 AM on March 11, 2019 [4 favorites]