SMOKING ANYWHERE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 19944, 31 October 1934, Page 10

SMOKING ANYWHERE

THE WOMEN OF TO-DAY Steadily every year women are smoking more, and more women are smoking, states a writer in the London “Daily Telegraph.” They smoke everywhere and at any time —in Tubes and buses and even in the streets; in the theatres and cinemas, and between courses at meals. No hostess would dare to forget to put ashtrays in her women guests' rooms. Neither youth nor advancing age is a deterrent. Debutantes have learned how to smoke gracefully at their fiinishing 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 this 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 twenty years. Before 1914, smoking by women was a smart-setish, suffragettish 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. When one recalls these facts it is impossible not to wonder what are likely to be the effects of this revolution in the social habits of more than half the adult population. Yet, curious to remark, the matter has attracted but little attention from scientists. No sociologist seems to have paid serious attention to it. The medical profession as a whole—although some doctors regard this mild self-drugging by women with disapproval—appears to have formed no judgment on the question whether continual smoking produces any different results, good or bad. in women compared with men. Meanwhile women continue to smoke more, and men to accept the new order of things with the same tolerance they have always displayed whenever women have changed their minds or their habits.