Women and the Dutch tea industry: revisiting the archives to reframe a narrative

Abstract

This article was first presented at the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium 2024, where it challenged archival narratives that depict Dutch women as passive consumers rather than recognising their entrepreneurial roles in the tea industry. Two key outcomes emerged: the need to deepen discussions on gender, consumption, and women’s social status in the Netherlands, and to consider the influence that visual archives have on perpetuating a biased narrative via artificial intelligence. In response, we return to the archives to document women’s contributions to the Dutch tea industry’s historical, political, and social fabric. Guided by a New Historicist approach, we align with Greenblatt’s view that cultural artefacts are embedded in material practices. We retain our original research question: How has the role of women been portrayed in the Dutch tea industry, and what visual material can help construct a new narrative? While the initial study examined 93 visuals from the Douwe Egberts Heritage site and the Rijksmuseum, the current dataset expands to 253, incorporating materials from Het Stadsarchief Amsterdam and the Dutch National Archives. This broader dataset, coded for deeper analysis, reaffirms earlier findings and offers new insights: archives function as memory placeholders shaped by context, and visual records are critical for developing more equitable artificial intelligence systems. We conclude this article with two main recommendations: first, expanding archival research to other Dutch cities can deepen understanding and support the development of more representative AI systems. Second, comparative studies with regions like Ostfriesland, which shares similar tea traditions, or countries like Britain and France, could reveal whether gendered portrayals in the tea industry were uniquely Dutch or part of a wider European pattern.