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Leisure, Politics, and Consumption of Tobacco
smoking by women was that it was clearly unrespectable, despite the frequent
allusions to aristocratic snuff takers persisting in what had been a common
eighteenth-century practice and the anecdotal and archaeological evidence that
points to the frequency of clay pipe smoking among older rural women. 10 Smoking
was associated with actresses and prostitutes, an image fixed in popular imagination
through the literary and artistic portrayals of Mérimée’s and later Bizet’s
gypsy factory girl, Carmen, Ouida’s androgynous Cigarette and the Zu-Zu’s of
various cavalry officers, the former model, Jacky, in E.M. Forster’s Howards End,
and the high number of scantily clad music hall actresses featured on the very first
cigarette cards of the 1890s. 11 Against this cultural background, the “new women”
of the 1890s smoked both in defiance of respectable codes of femininity and to
assert their independence in a masculine controlled public sphere. “Girls of the
period” and “wild women” caused much offence to commentators such as Eliza
Lynn Linton, but others including Mark Twain and the society divorcee Lady Colin
Campbell offered their support. 12 The tobacco trade was also not slow to respond,
with London retailers offering small, expensive, and often gold-tipped cigarettes
branded Two Roses, Dames, Miranda’s Dream, Boudoir, Pour la Dame, Virginia,
Gay Grissette, and Young Ladies. 13 Positive portrayals of female smokers also
appeared in fiction, in H.G. Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909), Grant Allen’s The
Woman Who Did (1895), and most persistently in Dorothy Richardson’s autobiographical
Pilgrimage, where Miriam marks each stage of her liberation and her
entry into the public sphere through her skill and confidence in the rituals of
smoking. 14
The employment changes of the First World War enabled many working-class
women to share in the liberatory aspects of smoking as they left domestic service
to enter the munitions factories, the clerical and commercial offices of the city,
and the transport industry. 15 Their smoking remained controversial, provoking
something of a backlash in the 1920s, though by now it was associated with a
host of other dangers of the modern Jazz Age – cocktails, Eton crops, and motor
cars. 16 But what smoking connoted for the vast majority of women in the interwar
years was glamour. Manufacturers were slow to pick up on this social trend and
advertising directed specifically at women tended to follow rather than lead
changing patterns in leisure. Instead, the cinema provided the strongest images of
smoking, beginning with a series of infamous morally deviant leading stars, from
Clara Bow’s It Girl of 1927, Louise Brooks’ fallen women in Pandora’s Box
(1929), the murderous Tallulah Bankhead in My Sin (1931), Mae West’s carnival
dancer in I’m No Angel (1933), and Marlene Dietrich’s portrayals of the nightclub
singer in The Blue Angel (1930) and the notorious Lily in Shanghai Express
(1932). 17 Smoking glamour was rendered more respectable in the later 1930s and
1940s in the roles of Mary Astor, Ingrid Bergman, Rita Hayworth, Bette Davis,
and most spectacularly by Lauren Bacall who in 1945 famously marked her screen
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