Women and Tobacco.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 937, 14 February 1890, Page 9

Women and Tobacco.

J. D. HUNTING, IN THE ‘ NATIONAL REVIEW. * ‘ Tobacco,’ it has been said, ‘ responds to the imperious craving after sensation in man.’ And does it not in woman also ? * Tobacco is the remedy of ennui.’ Are women never bored ? There is a little proverb, almoet too vulgar to bear quotation in a serious article, the transposition of which, however, bo well exemplifies my meaning, that I shall make bold to use it : ‘ Wbat is sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose.’ If such be the case, as undoubtefaly it is, why not have the women, who possess this yearning and suffer from this boredom, long enjoyed, iu company with their fathers, husbands and brothers, the solace of the pipe, the stimulant of the cigar, and the feeble seusationlism of the cigarette ? The answer to this will be found

buried in some larger, broader Questions. Why have women b eu long denied a voice in public affairs ? Why have the large proportion of them lived such scrupulously virtuous and-self. denying lives, yet condoned so many vices of the sterner sex ? Why did women of property become so frequently, on their marriage, virtual paupers depending on the fitful charity of tyrannical husbands ? These questions might be multiplied ad infinitum, for all tbese things have been. Do we not know the reason ? The civilised Anglo-Saxons, and the modern Christians of less than a century ago, were no very great advance on the uncivilised Turks and unregei erate heathen in the treatment of thtir women folk. Women were the dependent, the weaker, the Bubjugated sex ; they had no rights save those men in their kingship were pleased to confer on them iu their subjection. But the Anglo, feaxous and the Christians excelled the Easterns and Mahommedans in one thing: they had an ideal; an ideal of manhood whioh they did not much care to attain to, and an ideal of womanhood which was best maintained by force. Woman, who was in all actnal respects man's slave, was yet apostrophised and versified as man’s goddess and man’s qu6en. Woman was, in imagination at least, an angelic being, absolutely pure, delicate, and ethereal; was it befittiug that such an one should smoke? Should

she pollute her pretty lips with the ‘ precious stinke,’ on which, however, as far back a<i the reign of James I. some of the gentry thought it a brave thing to spend £3OO or £4OO a year ? Perish the thought ! So women were made non-smokers as they were made non-partioipators in many of men a privileges and pleasures, and women are becoming smokers because they no longer fear men’s criticisms nor oherisli their overfanciful ideas concerning them. Yet it is remarkable that they should desire to contract a habit without which they have so long and healthily existed, and which has flourished most among nations where women, mentally and morally, if not physically, have been weakest. Exceptional cases of strong and clever women usiDg tobacco are to be found, 1 grant, but, as I have shown, where the habit has been racial, there, with but one exception, have the women been servile in position and unmarked by mental or moral power. This fact gives birth to another theory. This latter-day disposition on the part of women, is it not, far from being the result of woman’s rightful elevation to the rank of a participant in mankind’s work for man, rather a mark of the degeneracy of the age and her reversion in common with man’s, to habits of almost Roman-like luxury and indulgence. Some male smokers are brave enough and clear enough to affirm that they see no reason why any woman should not smoke if she choose, but the vast majority of them are loud in their denunciations of the practice, when adopted by their mothers, sisters, or wives. X cannot believe that the root of this sentimental and persistent objection lies in the fact that they cling jealously to one of the few remaining exclusive privileges of man. Rather would I place it on a wider, nobler basis. It is because men know the evils of the habit they delight in that they desire to keep women from It in the future as in the pa9t. They dare not be so inconsistent as to denounce it as unsalutary yet continue to indulge in it themselves, so they trump ud reasons which women deem justly all insufficient. If men may smoke in defiance of the laws of cleanliness and economy, if men consider it no detriment to their physical comfort and personal charm to be possessed of bad breath and polluted hands, is there any reason why women should study these things in order to gratify the whim of those who take scant pains to please them in that respect ? But women like to see men smoke ; they encourage the habit in them, and have ever done so from the time of the great Elizabeth till now. Yes, women do ; their natural unselfishness and timidity make them shrink from interfering with the pleasures of others, and they have no idea of any distinct harm resulting from it ; they remember, too, that there are many worse things a man may do, and that he who is permitted to smoke ad lib. at home will not wish to go out to smoke, It is well, perhaps, that women have not, as a class, been jealous of tobacco, for they would have Btood little chance of persuading men to taboo it, even as men, argning as they do now, are not likely to cause women to give it np, unless their objections are founded on more purely reasonable grounds. Is smoking bad for women ? Then is it bad for men. Is smoking unbecoming in the one sex ? Then is it in the other. Do not thousands of women live, as men do, by their brain or handiwork ? Are not women fatigued, bored, and liable to fits of excitement or depression even as men are ? Why, then, should they be denied that which is said to soothe and cheer the weary toiler and solace the overworked brain ? There is no answer to these questions that is grounded on reason, though there are many of aesthetic feeling and personal fancy and idea. The habit of smoking has been stigmatised as an unmanly leaning on a solace neither sought nor needed by the weaker sex, yet it must not be considered therefore a -womanly consolation. It is argued that the day of woman’s blindness to her own needs is over, and she is no longer content to accept man|s estimate of the littleness of her wants, but iB ready to assert that her- correspondences, like his, are numberless. This is correct reasoning enough, but why have women this sudden need ? Is it not their inheritance ? Is not man’s insatiable appetite for tobacco transmitted from the father to the daughter ? After three centuries of abstinence Englishwomen are not taking to smoking on account of a sudden whim, but because an inherited instinct leads them, in their present emancipated condition, to seek their nerve sedative and stimulant where man has so long sought his. Can there be any reason then, in reason, why women should not smoke if men do ? Hear what the physiologist says :—' If the daughters of England were to oommence weakening their vital forces by the use of nicotine, we should find the children in another generation with an hereditary taste for poison and diminished power for resisting its onroad j they would be unhealthy, dyspeptic, and nervous.’ There is much virtue in an if, but when the non-probable bids fair to become the actual, it is time to prove the accuracy of the reasoning which asserts that these things should not be. Setting aside the fact, which none will deny, that smoking in excess is bad, every woman who is not yet in bondage to the habit, who has power to discern clearly the good and evil in this matter, must find out for herself whether the use of tobacco in moderation is prejudicial or beneficial to the race at large. The fact that in a single cigar is contained sufficient nicotine to kill two Btrong men is not so terrifying when it is remembered that the other substances which go to make it up have a neutralising effect ; though the schoolboy’s experiences after his first pipe show the dire results of the drug when taken in unaccustomed doses, whether large or small; it is no argument in its favour to say that strong men, clever men, ay, great men have smuked and owned no ill effects from it. Those strong men might have been stronger : those great men greater. It is not rational to argue, as the President of the United States did when certain officers of the army complained to him that General Grant was an immoderate drinker of whiskey, and he replied, ‘Let me kno ■< where Grant gets his whisky that 1 may send a barrelful to every general in the army.’ A Bismark may smoke, but no amount of smoking will create a Bismark,

rather will it, in nine cases ou of ten, destroy the embryo chancellor or statesman. Neither are the facts that wounded soldiers on the battle-field cry out for tobacco, that the Indians go for days without food, subsisting solely on the stimulus of the pipe, that lunatics are allowed to smoke to allay the frenzy of their diseased brains, and that by puffing at a big cigar the white man oreserves himself in tropical climates from insect pests (though he destroys the insects), any proof that tobacco is the health elixir some people would have us believe it to bo ; abnormal suffering, whether of mind or body requires a narcotic, unwonted situations demand unaccustomed habits. The chief harm of tobacco lies in the fact that the nicotic poison acts by a system of accumulation ; its toxic influences are not transitory as those of alcohol. Moderate quantities habitually taken result in chronic nicotism of the system. The process somewhat resembles that of tanning ; it is slow but permanent. Cannibals are said to turn up their noses at the nicotised flesh of smokers. But it is not the purpose af this article to enter into a medical dissertation on the therapeutic use and abuse of tobacco, or to detail the many nervous diseases caused by moderate smoking ; neither is it necessary to give statistics of the unequal proportions which the number of male patients bears to the female in our hospitals, who suffer from such diseases -as epithelioma, angina, pectoris, and amaurosis, which are, in almost all the cases, directly attrioutable to the practice of habitual smoking. Treatises on the subject exist and may be studied by women, as by men, who oare to go to the root of things. Sufficient it is to note that tobacco, or rather its Inherent prinoiple, nicotine, is a poisonous drug, stimulative when consumed in smali quantities, Bedative when taken in large, and that such stimulus and narcosis are only gained by an unnatural excitement or paralysis of the great nerve-centres, which are thereby rendered unfit for their important tasks of controlling the actions of lungs and heart. Stimulant means abstracted, not added, force ! Tobacco has no power to nourish or build up ; it can neither generate nor conserve vital heat, but in time destroys it and enfeebles every function, by a natural consequence, affecting the weakest parts first. That all these things are true may be believed, and yet women may do, what men have done, ahake off the thought with the reflection that if tobacco be a poison it is a very slow one. True, you strong-limbed, strong-brained woman, true ! You may uot feel the effects, as your weaker sisters inevitably would, this year or next ; may scarcely, perhaps, at the end of a long life, for yon will see to it that you are not overindulgent ; but how about the coming generation ! 4 Women bear the world and make it.’ Remember, hitherto our Englisn men, in common with our Englishwomen, have inherited only half a taste for tobacco ; bub what if such a state of things as Dr B. W. Richardson—at the time of writing a lover of the weed, though since become, on scientific grounds, a non-smoker —describes in the following paasage, were to come about? ‘I do not hesitate to say that if a community of both sexes, whose progenitors were finely formed and powerful, were to be trained to the early practice of smoking, and if marriage were confined to smokers, an apparently new and physically inferior race of men and women would be bred up.’ The day is gone by for forced acceptance of super ficial and unmeaning rules of eonduot, and women are free. But let them not use their liberty as a cloak for license. It is not for men—pre-eminently self-indulgent in this respect—to tell women what they shall or shall not do, bnt it is for each of us to enter deeply into all questions affecting human life, and to decide npcn them in such a way as will show us to be worthy of the dignity of man’s helpmate, and possessed of—‘The reason firm, the temperate will, Endurance foresight, strength, and skill.’ And, above all, a pure desire to live ‘ not unto ourselves,’ but unto the race at large.