WOMEN SMOKED 300 YEARS AGO

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23201, 13 March 1950, Page 5

WOMEN SMOKED 300 YEARS AGO

Women have smoked “divine tobacco” for the last 300 years, off and on. In 1615 it was a kind of first-thing-in-the-morning beauty culture to be taken in tiny clay pipes. “It will more purify, cleanse, and improve your complexion by 10 parts,” the old recipe quoted in the “Listener” says, “than your dissolv’d mercuric, joice of lemons, distilled snailes, gourd waters, oile of tartare, or a thousand such toys.”

In spite of this by 1712 the delights of snuff, richly scented, were so acceptable that tobacco was abandoned by the fashionable of both sexes for nearly a century. In seclusion, man resumed the nasty habit when the Napoleonic wars introduced the cigar while his ladylike lady winced at the smell.

Victorian tradition strictly separated “the fair sex” and “the fragrant weed,” but in 1845 there is evidence that some were toying with a sinful cigarette on the sly. A ladies’ journal of 1871 laments “the increasing masculine tastes of the ladies, such as slang and cigarettes,” and in the eighties bold young women might even be- seen shocking society by smoking their symbol of revolt in a hansom cab.