Thanks for this wonderful quote! I do not know the exact provenance of it, but it is very much in keeping with the type of propaganda against the quick rise of London coffeehouses and the popularity of coffee in the 1660s and 1670s. In pamphlets like The Ale-wives complaint against the coffee-houses (1675) and The womens petition against coffee (1674) a common complaint against the use of coffee was that it effeminates men and makes them lose their sex drive. Hence claims like '[coffee] has so eunuched our husbands, and crippled our more kind gallants, that they are become as impotent as age, and as unfruitful as those deserts whence that unhappy berry is said to be brought', or, that it 'dries up the radical moisture to the present prejudice of the [coffee drinkers'] wives and future disadvantage of posterity'! Both these quotes I got from Steven Pincus' superb article '"Coffee politicians does create": Coffeehouses and Restoration political culture', Journal of Modern History 67 (1995), 807-34. The writer of this article argues that pamphlets like these were not written by women or ale-wives, but were in fact propaganda from the Anglican Royalists who saw coffeehouses as places of sedition. Worth a read and some reflection, I think!

Gerald Groenewald

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jim McIntosh 
  To: [log in to unmask] 
  Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 5:50 PM
  Subject: coffee trivia


  I am not sure where I obtained the following quotation but it has to do
  with women protesting the popularity of coffee houses in London in the
  late 1600s from which women were barred.  I believe that it came from a
  petition to Parliament as it was stuck in some notes I gathered in 1989
  reading old newspapers in the British Museum (library at that time).  I
  wonder what it would do to the market for coffee if this rumor was revived!!
   "...coffee makes men unfruitful, causes domestic disorders and
  interferes with business as the men spend idle time and too much money
  at such houses."    cheers, Jim

  --
  James R. McIntosh
  Professor & Chair
  Department of Sociology & Anthropology
  Lehigh University
  681 Taylor Street
  Tel. 610 758 3809
  Fax: 610 758 6552