Sunday Sip: does "cozy" content marginalize women?

An argument for the importance of warmth, comfort, and homey pursuits.

Happy Sunday, friends! In case you missed my post last week, I’m switching up my Substack format. Look for weekly newsletter-style recaps + a “deep steep” of a topic that’s on my mind, on Sundays - my favorite day for slow reads with a cup of tea.

Recently I saw a comment in a podcast review that caught me off-guard. It said something to the effect of, “Can we just be done with ‘cozy’ already?”

It caught me off-guard, because who has a problem with coziness? And also, because as a person who creates a lot of “cozy” content, I wondered if I was committing the unforgivable American sin of being irrelevant or arriving too late to a trend.

It is to cringe.

Case in point - my most recent episode of The Tea’s Made featured a very cozy conversation with Sarah Powers!

But when I looked up “cozy” in the Google dictionary, here’s what I found:

adjective: giving a feeling of comfort, warmth, and relaxation - "a cozy cabin tucked away in the trees"

noun: a soft covering to keep a teapot, boiled egg, etc., hot

verb: to give (someone) a feeling of comfort or complacency - "she cozied him, pretending to find him irresistibly attractive"

I was most familiar with the first definition, pretty familiar with the second (though sadly I am not, at present, in possession of a tea cozy) and not at all familiar with the third.

Still, though, you can easily see the connection between the three. “Cozy” implies comfort, warmth, and softness. All things that most humans value and seek, and have since the beginning of history. And there’s an element of homeyness about cozy, too, instead of things that happen in the public schere

There’s nothing innately trendy about “cozy”.

And as long as humans long for the covering of a warm blanket on a chilly day, or feel drawn to the soft glow of a lamp, there’s no way for “cozy” to become irrelevant.

My favorite cozy corner of the sofa - equally adored by my husband.

But coziness does tend to be associated with women, and women’s interests and spaces. And consequently downplayed, marginalized, and even, sometimes, mocked.

And that’s unfair, if you ask me. Because men like cozy stuff too; it typically just gets a different kind of branding. Think of a historic men’s social club with its plush chairs, flickering fireplace, and haze of cigar smoke. That’s some Grade-A Cozy right there; but we tend to focus more on the Very Important Conversations that may have been happening in those rooms—the politics and literature and art, especially the stuff that made written history—than we do the rooms themselves. The cozy trappings were the backdrop to what we recognize as the real, important work.

Meanwhile, we seem a little more derisive or even suspicious of the coziness in women’s spaces, as though the conversations and connections happening within them aren’t real or important, too.

And maybe that’s because we conflate real and important, with recorded and named.

In today’s Deep Steep, I’m delving into why a thing can be important, yet not granted cultural Importance.

The Deep Steep: Women, Tea, and The Importance Of “Cozy”

Over the past few months I’ve found myself digging more and more deeply into the history of tea and the tea trade, and I’ve learned something that will surprise no one: the recorded history of this plant, beverage, lifestyle, and industry has been overwhelmingly male.

That’s not to say women are absent from the story. Women have always played a vital role in tea, planting and picking and drinking and serving, but their work has historically been more private, confined to the social spheres of their homes and neighborhoods.

Men, out-front as the crafters and connoisseurs and trade-war history-makers - not to mention the artists, philosophers and political revolutionaries who used tea houses as the spaces to spread their messages and have Important Conversations - became the “faces” (and names) of tea, and that dynamic persists today.

There are a handful of notable women who come up again and again in the larger tea story, particularly in the West; women like Catherine of Braganza—who is credited with first bringing tea to England—and various other royal women after her who influenced tea’s popularity.

But already-notable women influencing the drinking of tea isn’t quite the same thing as women becoming notable for their influence in tea. And the further back you go, as far back as ancient Chinese tea culture, the more true the disparity between importance and recognition seems to be.

None of this is surprising, or unique to the tea trade, of course. And it’s not old news, either. I wasn’t traveling the globe visiting tea houses and farms and shops in my 20s and 30s, developing my palate and making a name for myself in that world; I was mostly at home with my children, sipping whatever bagged English Breakfast I could find at the supermarket.

Like women throughout history, my participation in many pursuits has played out in mostly-private settings. Sometimes that’s been out of circumstance but also, often, choice. While I’m enjoying learning more about the different kinds of tea and enjoy nerdy takes on this growing region or that one, what attracts me most is the human story behind and around it, as well as the opportunity for ritual and connection embodied in a practice of making and drinking tea.

Which tracks with my personal interest in human history, too. I’ve never been nearly as interested in the “big stories” of cultures and histories—the pivotal battles, the notable names—as I am the small stories of how normal people lived: where they slept, what they ate, how they amused themselves. You know, all the cozy stuff.

Show me old pottery, tell me what people did in their homes: even (especially?) people whose names have been lost to history. Let me try to tackle that recipe that my decidedly un-famous great-great-great-grandmother might once have made.

Does that mean my interests aren’t serious or scholarly enough? By leaning into the “cozy” side of pursuits like tea, food, creativity, making a home, community-building, parenting, nature, and the like, am I somehow marginalizing…myself?

Certainly that’s the message we get in a culture that worships career and economic advancement, while ignoring or denigrating quieter pursuits.

And that idea has never sat well with me. It’s a losing proposition for women and men, actually. Just because historically, men were in a better position to achieve name recognition or accumulate wealth and power doesn’t mean most of them did it. Most people through history people have been quietly going about their lives without recorded recognition of their contributions. A lot of those contributions, for women and men, were small, ordinary, and home-oriented. You know—cozy.

We tend to conflate lasting importance with what’s been recognized and recorded as important. We confuse making an impact with getting credit for that impact. Which isn’t to say recognition and credit don’t matter, or are bad things to desire! I like getting credit and recognition for my writing, for example. But even if I didn’t, I would still write. And while my possibly unread writing might not be Important with the capital I assigned by history, the fact that I wrote would still be important.

Later today I plan to try my hand at making cheese - something I’ve always wanted to do but have never yet tried—too busy, no doubt, doing things both Important, like contributing to the GDP and getting my name put on things, and also small-i important, like picking up socks off the floor and making hundreds of pot roasts.

I don’t expect to be any good at cheese-making; I will almost certainly not, at this stage of my life, create a name for myself in the cheesemaking world, let alone earn any money from it. But it will feel nice, I think, to bustle around a warm kitchen for an hour or two, heating and stirring, pouring and pressing.

Comfortable, warm, relaxing. Cozy. The desires that make us human, and make our human world, brutal as it can be, also inhabitable.

I wish that women throughout time had received more recognition for their contributions to everything from tea to literature to politics.

But I also believe what we add to the human existence when we show up in our small worlds every day is immeasurably important, even if nobody outside our immediate family has cause to see it or notice it.

“Cozy” isn’t silly or frivolous: it’s crucial. And it only marginalizes us if we first marginalize it.

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That’s it for this week’s Sunday Sip, friends. Don’t miss the latest episode of The Tea’s Made featuring my conversation with Sarah Powers about cozy and creative spaces. And if you’re a paid subscriber, click over to this week’s So-Slow Book Club discussion. I’ll see you next week for another Deep Steep.

warmly,

Meagan