As women’s rights movements brewed in tearooms around the world, one brand made sure women could participate from home as well. A short history of Equality Tea for International Women’s Day.

In the history of humankind, women have always worked. They have not always earnt money for their work, and those who did earn an income were not always entirely in charge of it. But there’s one domain where women have often held sway: the household budget. And with this small power in mind, tea became the conduit through which the women’s suffrage movement in the US flourished.

Tea was already doing wonderful things for women’s rights around the world. In Australia, late-19th-century feminist figures such as Louisa Lawson ran campaigns from teahouses, the only reputable venue where women could meet outside the house as pubs and coffeehouses were considered men’s domains. In 1902, (white) Australian women were given the vote thanks to these efforts.

In the early 20th century, American women began to echo the success of their antipodean cousins, meeting in tearooms to advance their movement. But those in the movement were also mindful that many women who wanted to support them did not have the same time and opportunities to access these spaces.

The Californian Woman’s Suffrage Party addressed this by launching their own brand: Equality Tea. Available in half-pound, one-pound (about 450 grams) and five-pound boxes, with English breakfast, Ceylon, hyson, gunpowder and oolong on offer, sales of the tea contributed financially to the movement, whether the feminist-minded drinker sipped it in a San Francisco tearoom, purchased a box at a regional fair, or bought it by mail order to consume at their rural homestead.

According to The Atlantic, women also had the power of boycott by leveraging this tea: “Some grocers carried the tea, and there were women who refused to pay their grocery bills if their grocer did not carry Equality Tea.”

But fundraising was not the only reason that tea became the hero product for the women’s movement: it also emphasised the ordinary and accessible nature of equal rights that, like tea, should be welcome in every household. Reviews of how Equality Tea tasted have not been preserved, but that might just be the point – the tea was an ordinary product that enabled extraordinary things.

Find out more about International Women’s Day.

This article originally appeared in AUSTCS enews 8 March 2022. Mailchimp no longer allows external links to the original newsletter.