A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water
Not Eleanor Roosevelt — an anonymous saying she never wroteUnknown — an anonymous proverb, in print by 1915Tea simile in a Seattle newspaper, 1915 · “tea bags” version by 1958
?Attribution status: Disputed — the saying predates its attribution to Roosevelt by decades and appears in none of her writings.?Reuse status: Rights unconfirmed
There is no primary source for this line in Eleanor Roosevelt’s books, columns or speeches, and archivists at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library searched her writings without finding it. Quote Investigator ↗ traces the simile to a 1915 Seattle newspaper and the “tea bags” wording to the 1950s, and concludes there is no direct evidence Roosevelt ever used it.
“A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water” commonly credited to Eleanor Roosevelt, but there is no source for it in her writings. Quote Investigator traces the simile to a 1915 Seattle Daily Times item and the "tea bags" wording to a 1958 Milwaukee Journal report; attributions to Roosevelt appear only from the 1990s. Via Quotle.info.
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Eleanor Roosevelt. Use the credit shown above instead.
Can you use it?
? We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.
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In context
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Provenance
The paper trail, not the primary source
Attributed work
None — no book, column, speech or letter has ever been cited
Earliest documented simile
Seattle Daily Times, 15 January 1915 (tea, applied to men)
Earliest documented “tea bags” form
Milwaukee Journal, 4 December 1958, reporting a sales talk by Armand J. Gariepy
Credited to Eleanor Roosevelt
Only from the 1990s, always without a source
A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.
No primary source
There is no fuller original context to show, because no original has ever been found. This is the modern popular wording of a proverb that circulated for decades in other forms — men as eggs, men as potatoes, people as tea — before it acquired both the tea bag and a famous name.
1915 — the simile, without the bag.Quote Investigator ↗ cites a Seattle Daily Times item of 15 January 1915 comparing men to tea, whose real strength is not drawn out until they get into hot water; it also documents nineteenth-century forerunners using eggs (1858) and potatoes (1870).
1958–1967 — the tea bag arrives, then the women.Quote Investigator ↗ cites the Milwaukee Journal of 4 December 1958 for Armand J. Gariepy using the tea-bag version of people generally, and a State Times Advocate report of 17 April 1967 for Phyllis Schlafly applying it to women.
1981 — the first famous woman it was pinned to was not Eleanor.Wikiquote ↗ records a very similar remark attributed to Nancy Reagan in The Observer, 29 March 1981.
1990s — Eleanor Roosevelt’s name is attached, and sticks.Wikiquote ↗ points to The Wit and Wisdom of Eleanor Roosevelt (1996) as an example of the sourceless credit, and notes that archivists have not been able to find the line in any of her writings.
No rights status can honestly be asserted for this wording: it has never been tied to an identifiable work or first publication. The forms that are documented — the 1915 and 1958 newspaper items — are different sentences, and the modern “a woman is like a tea bag” phrasing circulates as an anonymous proverb. Treat it as unattributed rather than as free-to-use public domain text.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
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Fact-check
Who has been credited — and who actually said something like it
This is a proverb with a long, ownerless history and a series of borrowed owners. Quote Investigator documents each of the following; none of them is the line’s inventor, and Eleanor Roosevelt is not among the people it can be shown to have used.
✕
The popular creditEleanor Roosevelt No source
Credited to her in quote collections such as The Wit and Wisdom of Eleanor Roosevelt (1996), but with no original source; Wikiquote ↗ files it under Disputed and notes that archivists have not been able to find it in any of her writings.
✕
A near-identical line, actually attributed in printNancy Reagan 1981
Wikiquote ↗ records a very similar remark attributed to Nancy Reagan in The Observer of 29 March 1981 — a woman being like a teabag, her strength apparent only in hot water.
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Earlier documented users of the tea-bag sayingArmand J. Gariepy, Phyllis Schlafly, Lowell Bruce Laingen, Rita Mae Brown 1958–1985
Quote Investigator ↗ cites Gariepy using it of people in a 1958 sales talk, Schlafly applying it to women in 1967, Laingen using it of human beings in 1981, and Rita Mae Brown in a 1985 essay — all as a floating adage rather than an original coinage.
✕
Modern amplificationHillary Clinton Repeated as Eleanor’s
Quote Investigator ↗ lists her among the public figures who have used the aphorism and credited it to Eleanor Roosevelt, which helped fix the attribution in popular memory.
✓The honest answer: it is an anonymous saying. Quote Investigator ↗ concludes that a variant of the simile was being shared by 1915, that “tea bags” entered the adage by the 1950s, and that there is currently no direct evidence Eleanor Roosevelt employed the statement.
Context
A proverb that grew a famous owner
Sayings like this one rarely have an author — they have a drift. Quote Investigator tracks a family of “hot water” similes running back into the nineteenth century, built first on eggs and potatoes, then on tea, and finally on the tea bag once tea bags were a household object. The tea-bag phrasing shows up in a 1958 sales-training talk, applied to people in general; it was pointed specifically at women by the mid-1960s.
What it never had was a first speaker famous enough to make it quotable. Attaching it to Eleanor Roosevelt fixed that. By the 1990s the line was circulating as hers, and it has been repeated in quote collections, on merchandise and in speeches ever since — including by Hillary Clinton, who has cited it as a favourite Eleanor line.
The saying was in print for decades before anyone thought to credit it to Eleanor Roosevelt.
Read the full story
Ralph Keyes, in The Quote Verifier, reported that archivists at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library searched Roosevelt’s writings for the expression and did not find it — the finding Wikiquote cites in placing the line under “Disputed.”
Anyone who wants to test the attribution can: the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project hosts the full, searchable run of her My Day column, published from 31 December 1935 until 26 September 1962.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1884–1962 · US First Lady, UN delegate & author of “My Day”
Eleanor Roosevelt was First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, later a US delegate to the United Nations and chair of its Human Rights Commission, and the author of the six-days-a-week newspaper column My Day, which ran from 1935 until 1962. She wrote and spoke in public almost daily for nearly three decades, which is exactly why unsourced aphorisms drift toward her: the corpus is enormous, so a stray line feels like it must be in there somewhere. This one is not. Archivists at the FDR Library have searched her writings for it without success.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
How to cite this page
No primary source in Eleanor Roosevelt. Earliest attestations documented by Quote Investigator: “Where They Resemble,” Seattle Daily Times, January 15, 1915, p. 13, col. 7 (tea, not tea bags); and Armand J. Gariepy, quoted in “Leap Before You Look—Sales Advice,” Milwaukee Journal, December 4, 1958, pt. 2, p. 23, col. 5 (first “tea bags” form cited there). See Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: People are Like Tea Bags,” February 3, 2013.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water’?” Last verified 22 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/a-woman-is-like-a-tea-bag-you-never-know-how-strong-she-is/