Mothering the teapot

Taking afternoon tea with the family is a favourite Mother’s Day (12 May) experience for many, but once upon a time ‘being mother’ meant taking charge of the teapot.

Shall I be mother? It’s a British idiom that speaks broadly about women’s roles in the household and, importantly, women’s connection with tea, but how did it become a saying?

According to history professor Markman Ellis at the Queen Mary University of London, the first recorded incidence of the saying is from an 1873 issue of children’s magazine The Nursery in a poem called ‘The Children’s Party’ by Elizabeth Sill.

Will you come to our party to-day, Carrie Wynn?

The party is all ready now to begin;

And you shall be mother, and pour out the tea,

Because you’re the oldest and best of the three.

(extract)

Sill creates a picture of a children’s tea party with the role of ‘mother’, the tea-pourer, a reference to the fact that children would often copy roles they saw in their own households.

But it was not until the 20th century that the phrase caught on beyond the realm of children, first in a handful of novels before entering popular parlance and the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, where the concept of ‘being mother’ meant specifically being in charge of serving tea from a teapot. In a more general sense, however, it has come to mean looking after or nurturing a group, whether the ‘mother’ is female or otherwise.

University of Hull historian Alex Gill adds that there’s a superstitious element to the phrase as well. “During the 1930s, if a man and woman took turns in pouring, a child would be born to them. A female visitor must not pour tea in another woman’s house – otherwise, she would fall pregnant. Thus, an early form of birth-control was to let only one person do all the pouring in company!”

So if you’re having tea this Mother’s Day, be mother for a while and offer to handle the teapot to give yours a rest from pouring duties.

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This article originally appeared in AUSTCS enews 7 May 2024.