Women and smoking share checkered history
By Cynthia Crossen
The Wall Street Journal
March 12, 2008

Mrs. William P. Orr was riding in a car on 5th Avenue in New York City in 1904 when she lit up a cigarette. A policeman on a bicycle ordered her to put it out. "You can't do that on 5th Avenue while I'm patrolling here," he told her.

Until the late 1920s, a woman who smoked in public was not only considered vulgar, she risked a warning from the police. In 1922, a New York alderman, Peter McGuinness, proposed a city ordinance that would prohibit women from smoking in hotels, restaurants or other public places.

"Young fellows go into our restaurants to find women folks sucking cigarettes," the alderman argued. "What happens? The young fellows lose all respect for the women, and the next thing you know the young fellows ... desert their homes, their wives and children, rob their employers and even commit murder so that they can get money to lavish on these smoking women."

A Washington Post editorial in 1914 declared, "A man may take out a woman who smokes for a good time, but he won't marry her."

There had been famous high-profile female smokers, of course. In the late 18th Century, Rachel Jackson, wife of the seventh president, sometimes handed her pipe to a dinner guest, saying, "Honey, won't you take a smoke?" In the mid-19th Century, the French novelist George Sand openly smoked cigars. But before the 1930s, most women smoked only in their homes.

World War I drew many women out of their homes to jobs where their co-workers smoked. The suffrage movement, culminating in the 19th Amendment in 1920, drew attention to other gender inequalities. Smoking became a visible symbol of defiance and feminism.

But the old ways died hard. In 1920, Hugh S. Cumming, surgeon general of the U.S., warned that "the cigarette habit indulged by women tends to cause nervousness and insomnia and ruins the complexion."

In 1921, U.S. Rep. Paul Johnson of Mississippi proposed a bill to make it illegal for "female persons" to smoke in "any public place where two or more persons are gathered together" in the capital. The bill never came to a vote.

In 1928, the executive board of the Cleveland Boy Scouts recommended that Scouts use their influence to discourage women from smoking, saying it "coarsens" women and "detracts from the ideal of fine motherhood."

Capitalism came to the rescue. Philip Morris brought out a cigarette for women with the slogan "Mild as May." The American Tobacco Co. suggested smoking could make you thin, proclaiming "You can't hide fat, clumsy ankles. When tempted to overindulge, reach for a Lucky."

According to a U.S. government estimate, the number of women between 18 and 20 years old who began smoking cigarettes tripled between 1911 and 1925 and more than tripled again by 1939.

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