Tobacco – smoking among Women.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 933, 17 January 1890, Page 4

Tobacco - smoking among Women.

Tobacco-smoking, in this country at least, has till recently been regarded as one of the peculiar privileges of the male sex. Of late years, however, the habit has undergone certain important changes as regards the extent of ifca influence. It has attached adherents by the hundred from among the most youthful of the community, and it has, we might also say, in a great measure changed its sex. Many men, and these a? capable, as active, and as worried as their fellows, have always been and still are, found among the nonBmokers ; while, on the other hands, a belief seems to be growing that women are largely adopting tobacco in its more aesthetic forms as feminine perquisite. To it 3 therapeutic charm as an aid to digestion, a soother of worries, and a mild hypnotic, is added its alleged faculty of rendering women more companionable to their husbands or brothers who smoke. On such grounds its wider extension as a socal custom has been strongly advocated by some, while others avain repudiate it with equal warmth as a veritable poison of domestic womanhood. The ques. tion, • indeed, is incapable of settlement on purely physiological grounds. It may be freely granted that tobacco does in some degree yield that artificial nerve-reßt which is claimed for it ; but this will not suffice to silence objection, for it 3 use by the smoker is more thaa a nv.re therapeutic method. Like every other luxury, it carries with it something of the slavery of indulgence, and this to an extent not known in the case of the simpler restortives. While, therefore, we admit that its moderate use is in many instances not only practically harmless, but even beneficial, we cannot allaw that its general adoption is at all necessary or likely to prove advantageous. What is true regarding its effect upon men is even more applicable to its influence on women. The companionship of the saxes has, in our opinion, little to gain from the fragrant weed. Concord of the kind suggested is, after all, but a gross bond of union, and the finest common influence we would say is here, as in many other things, not that of ' like to like,' but of 'like in difference.'—Lancet.