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Article: "Woman's Place is in the Tea Room": White Middle-Class American Women as Entrepreneurs and Customers
- Article from:
- The Journal of American Culture
- Article date:
- June 1, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Jun 2009. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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There is perhaps no business more pre-eminently
a woman's field than that of feeding the public.
There is no barrier, no prejudice, no tradition against
woman's activity in the eating world ....
[T]hat woman's place is in the tea room has been
accepted as an inevitable corollary of "woman's
place is in the home."
(Ware and Ware 565)
The tea room played an important role in bringing housebound late-nineteenth-century elite and middle-class women into the business world. A study of these cozy restaurants is important because tea rooms evolved into an early-twentieth-century cultural institution, one initiated by women. Tea rooms are also important because they impacted popular dogma regarding ...