Boston Tea Party Analysis

Appropriation of the Destruction of the Tea Historical narratives are protean; as these stories are told and re-told throughout the ages, they morph with each passing from one mouth to another. "Historical narratives are ... also metaphorical statements which suggest a relation of similitude between such events and processes and the story types that we conventionally use to endow the events of our lives with culturally sanctioned meanings." The myth we know as the Boston Tea Party was not always the coherent narrative we recognize today. With each passing generation, different groups have appropriated the public memory of the Destruction of the Tea in Boston Harbor to forward their own agendas. Specifically, women’s suffragists throughout
In an attempt to civilize the patriotic memory of the Tea Party, the genteel “ladies” ironically participated in parties that domesticated the tradition of dissent with toy chests of tea, women dressed in “ye old costumes”, actual drinking of tea and speakers who espoused America’s exceptionalism while also dismissing the “lawless violence” of the Boston Tea Party.8 For example, Robert C. Winthrop, a Republican congressman and president of the Massachusetts Historical Society disavowed the “destruction of the tea” saying, “We are not here today I think to glory over a mere act of violence, or a merely successful destruction of property.”8 Other speakers at the city-sponsored celebration continued to tone down controversy in the Tea Party narrative. These popular parties attempted to tame its memory, concealing its radical and rebellious history, making its memory a literal tea party. In contrast to to the genteel ladies celebrating the Boston Tea Party as an eloquent reminder of the country’s greatness, the suffragists resurrected the voices of the early protestors to remind the nation how much of that greatness had yet to be
Although suffragists did not find it necessary to actually throw tea into the harbor, they did recognize some parallels between the colonists’ situation one hundred years earlier and their own, both lacking equal rights. They celebrated these men to legitimize their own cause by providing it with a mythic history. By turning tea to suffrage, these women attempted to demonstrate that suffrage was rooted in the same principles that American heroes fought for one hundred years earlier. Woman suffragists went beyond just adopting the name and ideas of the Boston Tea Party for their events, but also enacted the Boston Tea Partiers tradition of dissent by urging American women to refuse to pay their taxes. They framed their dissent as rational by using the memory of the Boston Tea Party slogan, “Taxation Without Representation Is Tyranny”. Despite statements that the Woman Suffragist Tea Parties were illegitimate, the past became an active rationale for their present