![The Women’s Petition Against Coffee. Representing to Publick Consideration the Grand Inconveniences accruing to their Sex from the Excessive Use of that Drying Enfeebling Liquor. Presented to the Right Honourable Keepers of the Liberty of Venus. By a Well-willer (London, n.p., 1674), [2], 6pp. BL: 1038.i.47.(1). ESTCR11811. Hünersdorff](https://images.tandf.co.uk/common/jackets/crclarge/978131509/9781315094649.jpg "The Women’s Petition Against Coffee. Representing to Publick Consideration the Grand Inconveniences accruing to their Sex from the Excessive Use of that Drying Enfeebling Liquor. Presented to the Right Honourable Keepers of the Liberty of Venus. By a Well-willer (London, n.p., 1674), [2], 6pp. BL: 1038.i.47.(1). ESTCR11811. Hünersdorff")
ABSTRACT
The Women’s Petition Against Coffee is a libertine squib on the revolution in sexual manners supposedly inaugurated by the emergence of the coffee-house. The Women’s Petition returns to the genre of the mock petition, closely related to other mock tracts of restoration satire, especially the mock complaint and mock queries. Like these forms, the satire is directed against the authoritative and political pretensions of the original form: in this case the petition addressed to an authoritative body: here ‘the Right Honourable Keepers of the Liberty of Venus’, an ironic reference to rakes and whores. Ostensibly the satiric focus is on men: the coff ee-house renders them impotent and effeminate. The theory that coffee ‘extinguishes the Inclination to Venery, and induces Sterility’ had been reported by Olearius in his embassy to Persia in 1634, and confirmed in the Danish physician Simon Paulli’s Commentarius de abusu tabaci et herbae thee ([Strasbourg], Argentorati, 1665), fols 37r–39r. But the satire is not directly concerned with medical theory: rather the topic is gender roles, directed against the desiring woman, whose libidinality is limitless and whose carnal appetite is insatiable (a reprise of enduring misogynist discourse). The petition begins by recalling nostalgically the days when English men were virile and lusty, and ascribes the passing of this sexual vigour to this ‘Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor’ called coffee. The satire is directed against the cultural reformation that coffee-houses were understood to have introduced in London society: the men who congregate in the coffee-houses are associated with the supposedly feminine attributes of talking and gossiping. Men in the coffee-house ‘out-babble an equal number of [women] at a Gossipping, talking all at once in Confusion, and running 110from point to point … insensibly, and … swift ly’ (below p. 116). This conceit is literalised as sexual impotence, and concatenated with complaints about the amount of time men devoted to the homosocial world of the coffee-house. The contrast between kinds and manners of drinking probably carried political connotations: the flamboyant and libertine world of wine and beer drinking was associated with Royalist politics; while the austere and discursive world of coffee-house debate was associated with radical and republican politics.
