WOMEN SMOKERS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22824, 7 March 1936, Page 26

WOMEN SMOKERS

AN INCREASING HABIT Steadily every year women are smoking more, and more women are smoking. They smoke everywhere and at any time —in tubes and buses, and even in the streets; in theatres and kinemas, and between courses at meals. No hostess would dare to forget to put ashtrays in her women guests' rooms (states a London writer). Neither youth nor advancing age is a deterrent. Debutantes have learned how to smoke gracefully at their finishing schools, just as their grandmothers were taught the ladylike way to enter or descend from a carriage. Walk into any of the several hundred bridge clubs in London, and you will perceive that white hair and grey smoke are not considered incongruous. The evidence of observation is borne out by official statistics. It is, of course, impossible to tell what proportions of the tobacco this country buys go to narcotise, respectively, male and female nerves. But it is pretty clear that men alone are not responsible for the fact that in the first six months of last year the United Kingdom imported 95.832.8611 b of tobacco, compared with 84,713,8331 b in the first half of 1933, and with 67,464.0801 b in the corresponding period of 1932. The social phenomenon of almost universal smoking by women has developed very gradually through the past 20 years. Before 1914 smoking by women was a smartHsetish, suffrapettieh practice—a prank for the frivolous and a solemn secretly disliked symbol of emancipation for the blue stocking. It was taboo in restaurants and vehicles, and a joke in the comic papers.