"Junior League" American tea-culture?

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mbanu
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Joined: Fri May 03, 2019 3:45 pm

Fri Oct 23, 2020 11:25 am

I keep coming across tea-related books published by them, such as "More than a Tea Party" by the Junior League of Boston, or "Tea-Time at the Masters" [Golf Tournament] by the Junior League of Augusta. Apparently they were started in 1901 in New York as the "Junior League for the Promotion of the Settlement Movement", which as far as I can decipher was a movement for intentional gentrification before the negative side-effects of this were understood.

I really wonder how tea became involved in all this -- were they holding tea-parties in the hopes of converting their poor neighbors to tea-drinking? While the current trend for rare teas obscures this a bit, everyday teas that are quite drinkable are something available to everybody at a reasonable price.

The Junior League of Houston seems to run a tearoom: https://www.jlh.org/tearoom/ Many more seem to host teas, without running a dedicated space.

Does anybody know anything about this tea-culture?
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