FOR LADIES ONLY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26849, 13 August 1948, Page 4

FOR LADIES ONLY

The provision, in the plans for the new Women’s Rest Rooms in the Octagon of a smoking room may be interpreted, according to choice, as an indication of how far Dunedin has advanced or regressed in a hundred years. It was within the lifetime of Otago that smoking was regarded with horror by genteel women, not only for themselves but their menfolk. Queen Victoria, it is on record, punished her son Edward with severity when he was discovered enjoying a furtive cigarette in Buckingham Palace; and Mr Arthur Pendennis, staying at a country house in 1850, or thereabouts, might smoke only in his bedroom and by the open window, for fear that his hostess berate him for his vice. But it is to the Continental revolutions of 1848, and the coming into popularity, of the cigarette in the West, that Count Sforza attributes the rise of the habit among all classes and conditions of men. It is a matter of comment among men particularly when ladies are not about —that there is no enterprise they have developed, from golf and aviation to the wearing of trousers, that women have not in their time sedulously imitated. There is no reason, accepting this unchivalrous premise, why they should be expected to refrain from smoking, and ergo, it is natural that they should require a smoking room wherein to indulge their fancy. If, as Bismarck declared, and many a greater and a lesser man has echoed, smoking “ soothes the nerves,” then it might be claimed, indeed, that women, more than men, need the solace > of the cigarette. Conducting a loaded perambulator, an infant toddler and a burden of household purchases through the city streets to-day is probably the most nerve-wracking of civilised enterprises. The new Rest Rooms are designed to alleviate the strain of this terrifying adventure, and it will be pleasant for the male passer-by to reflect, as he hurries through the Octagon, that within the Athenaeum building a harem-like atmosphere prevails in which his wife reclines in weary luxury and puffs at a restoring cigarette. The Rev. Thomas Bums would, not have approved of this innovation in civic planning; but smoking was not, in his time, the patriotic duty that Mr Nash has

made it—a comforting method of contributing to the country’s unstable finances. And if there remains a prejudice against women smoking cigarettes, this is a lesser evil surely than the feminine smoker’s indulgence in other days, when the ill-fated Elizabeth of Austria would impatiently detach herself from affairs of State to puff a Virginia cigar with her husband, or Kipling’s faithless Tommy could fail in love with a Burmese beauty “ a-smokin’ of a whackin’ white cheroot.” Certainly it is iess evilsmelling.