931 929 1 PB

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Liberation Sticks or Coffin Nails?

Representations of the Working
Woman and Cigarette Smoking
in Canada, 1919-1939
SHARON ANNE COOK
Abstract. When Canadian women first took up public smoking in the 1920s, the
attraction was a complex one, both for them and for advertisers. Newly enfranchised and moving into the workforce in ever greater numbers, the (usually)
young and single waged or salaried woman sought a ready symbol for her liberation as well as the pleasures resulting from the product itself to encapsulate
the presumed freedom of the era. Commercial interests both responded to
womens personal and cultural goals and furthered them by reconceptualizing
smoking in the public mind as a behaviour associated with respectable, middleclass women in public spaces. Despite this representation, the archetypal
woman smoker in the 1920s was a waged or salaried woman, not a middleclass one. Working women defined the image of the female smoker.
Rsum. Quand les femmes canadiennes ont commenc fumer en public
dans les annes 1920, lattrait tait complexe, tant pour elles que pour les publicitaires. Nouvellement affranchies et entrant sur le march du travail en
plus grand nombre, gnralement jeunes et clibataire, ces femmes salaries y
voyaient un symbole de leur liberation; le plaisir contenu dans ce produit
reprsentait en quelque sorte la prsume libert de cette poque. Les intrts
commerciaux rpondaient galement aux aspirations personnelles et culturelles
des femmes par une reconceptualisation du tabac dans lesprit public, en lassociant aux femmes respectables de la classe moyenne. En dpit de cette
reprsentation, larchtype de la fumeuse des annes 1920 tait une femme
salarie, plutt quune femme de classe moyenne. Louvrire dfinissait limage
de la femme fumeuse.
Sharon Anne Cook, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa.

CBMH/BCHM / Volume 24:2 2007 / p. 367-401
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When Canadian women first took up public smoking in the 1920s, the
attraction was a complex one.1 Newly enfranchised and moving into
the workforce in ever greater numbers, the (usually) young and single
waged or salaried woman sought a ready symbol for her liberation as
well as the pleasures resulting from the product itself to encapsulate
the presumed freedom of the era. The representation of the cigarette
smoker by commercial interests and popular cultural denizens both
answered this personal and cultural goal and furthered it. The tasks of
those marketing cigarettes were also complex. First, smoking needed to
be reconceptualized in the public mind from an act associated most
strongly with drug addicts and drinkers, prostitutes, European-influenced intellectuals and artists, to one identified with respectable women.
Secondly, if respectability were to be inscribed in an act known for its
shady origins, representations of the woman smoker needed to be marketed as middle-class, despite the smokers challenge to typically middleclass activities; finally, the woman smoker must be shown to engage in
this act publicly in order to normalize and elevate it from its shadowy
past. By the 1920s, the archetypal public woman who became a vehicle
for accepted smoking was a waged or salaried woman.
This is not to suggest that working women were necessarily the first
to smoke; in fact, of the scanty data available to us, it seems that many
waged women rejected public smoking in pre-war Canada and even
during the 1920s and 30s, and for good reason. For the act of smoking in
public offered women both pleasure and danger: smoking offered a
means for young women to act out their fantasies around new consumer-based norms of overt sexuality,2 modernity through sophistication
and slimness,3 and at the same time, smoking represented the distinct
threat of a risky act which could displace the waged or salaried woman
from her tenuous toe-hold in the respectable working world. Smoking
was a critical bridging behaviours between good and bad. It allowed
visual representation of a mid-ground for women somewhere between
respectable and unrespectable and became associated with the working woman, herself in a liminal position. Rather than respectable or
not, the term associated with the woman smoker was sophistication
with its profoundly modern tone.
The woman smoker of the 1920s was different in many ways from her
predecessors: her behaviours consciously encompassed both danger and
promise through this still-risky public act; as well, she lived a public and
waged or salaried life, rather than a private, supported one. By the end
of the World War II, the combined effect of womens personal attraction to cigarettes and the efforts of the advertising industry seem to
have swung the balance towards large-scale acceptance of women smoking. By that time, the image of the woman smoker had been redefined,
indeed, almost mandated for women to claim their version of sophisti-
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cation. See for example, Figure 1, a typical office interior of the W. J.

Bush & Co, Montreal in 1950.4 The two women stenographers in the
foreground both have ashtrays prominently displayed at the front of
their desks, suggesting that clients and perhaps employees were welcome to smoke. However in the interwar period, the image of the sophisticated woman smoker was being actively constructed and contested.
Figure 1
McCord Museum Photograph Collection, View-26566, People-Occupation-Office 821,

Interior of office, W. J. Bush & Co., Montreal, QC, 1950 (EN4).
Cigarette smoking has always carried with it a sense of danger. The

cultural framework within which womens long romance with smoking
was born suggests that while smoking did telegraph womens growing
assertiveness and sophistication from the 1920s, the act also represented
social danger, hinting at ruin if smoking were not used in the right places
and in the right ways, following an increasingly restrictive social code
around the public waged woman. As well, smoking was long known to
carry health risks. Nineteenth-century Hygiene textbooks worried about
smokings capacity to act as an appetite suppressor, cautioning young
men (the only perceived smokers of the era) that without eating regularly and sensibly, they could never hope to be athletic and strong.5 A
popular textbook of the 1880s, for example, pointed out that smoking
caused dilation of the pupils, dimness of sight, a barely perceptible pulse
and difficulty breathing, faintness, nausea, vomiting, giddiness, delirium, loss of power of the limbs, general relaxation of the muscular system, trembling, complete prostration of strength, coldness of the sur-
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face, with cold, clamming perspiration, convulsive movements, paralysis, and death.6 Nineteenth-century temperance publications warned
smokers that cancers of the mouth, tongue and throat appeared to be
linked to smoking. Beyond the physical dangers, however, lay a universe of moral peril. One 19th-century temperance principle was that
smoking created an appetite for hard drugs and alcohol, and compromised the soul through deadening the conscience, honour and the desire
for progress while encouraging impurity and sloth. Womens groups
like the Womans Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.) took up the
refrain of the large percentage of young menfound unfit for service in
our last war [Boer War] as a result of the use of tobacco.7
With her essential reproductive role, the woman smoker was accused
of placing her body as well as her morals in peril. Readers of Mac Levy s
popular 1916 book, Tobacco Habit Easily Conquered learned that smoking
devitalizes and debilitates even the sturdiest and healthiest of women.
It retards the normal functioning of the delicate organs. It has a harmful
effect upon offspring before and after birth. It is even a potential cause of
sterility itself.8 Consistent with this view, John Harvey Kelloggs Tobaccoism or How Tobacco Kills argued that tobacco destroys the sex glands
and hinders reproduction in men, women and animals, the latter
shown in clinical studies.9 Other studies of the 1920s contested these
negative effects on womens reproductive capacity. In his 1927 review of
the literature relating to female tobacco workers tendency to menstrual
disorders, miscarriage and premature labour, Schrumpf-Pierron reported
difficulty rates of 45% at the same time as studies denying any effect on
women of handling tobacco.10 A decade later, the claims were even more
measured. In the case of nicotine , in experiments on animals, it can
produce atrophy and degeneration of the genital organs. To what extent
this applies to human beings, considering the dilute form in which it is
taken, has not been ascertained up to the present time.11 Nevertheless,
the general physical toll on the body from smoking was thought to present particular dangers for delicate women.
Today, we are ever more aware of the bodily challenges of smoking. It
remains the number one preventable cause of disease and death in
Canada, with the number of annual mortalities somewhere around
45,000 each year.12 Almost a quarter of young women aged 20 to 24
smoked in 2006.13 But for 2005, this is the lowest rate to be reported since
1965 when smoking statistics in Canada were first collected, the rate for
young women is declining more slowly than for most other sectors of the
population. Despite the strong evidence that many young working-class
women today are committed smokers, there is no doubt that the allure
extends beyond this group to large numbers of middle-class women
seeking to remain slim and controlled.14 Moreover, there is clear evidence of the particular threats presented by smoking to women. These
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include the lethal combination created by some oral contraceptives and

smoking, the higher incidence of cancer of the cervix and osteoporosis,
higher rates of miscarriage, premature births, stillborns and low birthweight,15 a vastly increased risk of developing breast cancer if smoking is
begun within five years of the onset of the menses16 and much else,
including direct effects on female smokers children17 through secondhand smoke. That this powerful evidence now amassed and regularly
presented through the media has not deterred young women in comparison with other population sectors, suggests that the process of
redefining smoking as a respectable and useful behaviour for young
women which began in the 1920s, has finally triumphed in the face of
clear health threats.
Historical interest in the targeting of the young working woman as a
potential market for cigarettes has begun to receive some treatment.
Within the past two decades, the first scholarly histories of tobacco and
of the prosperous corporations it spawned have generated a historiography mainly interested in the struggle between groups, with tobacco
figuring as a pivotal and powerful symbol of corporate rapacity pitted
against the public interest.18 The importance of tobacco for the professionalization of doctors has also been explored as part of this groupbased analysis.19 In the past decade, our attention has been focused on
how tobaccos corporate message has been marketed to an apparently
unwary public, women included.20 To a limited degree, smoking has
been considered from the point of view of the individual and other moralized behaviours, such as drinking, drug-taking and gambling, generally associated in some way with temperance.21 Of greatest interest for
this study, womens special attraction to cigarettes has been historiographically situated within the larger context of an increasingly hedonistic society seeking freedom from constraint. The advent of the woman
smoker in the 1920s and various other liberating elements in their lives
including the franchise, less constraining dress, more opportunities for
unchaperoned leisure activities because of affordable cars, and higher
rates of paid employment with womens consequent power as consumers22have all been presented as examples of women throwing off
outworn conventions and choosing to smoke. In addition, there has
been some limited treatment of the woman smoker as new market niche
for tobacco purveyers.23 Most recently, Jarrett Rudys study explores
changing public views of tobacco consumption by women and men in
Montreal between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries. Rudys contribution to the Canadian historiography parallels in many ways Cassandra
Tates in the United States and Matthew Hiltons for Britain in their
exploration of the changing ideological frameworks used to justify acts
like smoking, and specifically, the decline of moral explanations to ones
based on a liberal view of personal rights.24 All three of these very useful
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studies draw on popular cultural references to explain the development

of a masculine culture of consumption as a constituent of masculine
identity formation. Less attention has been devoted to ways in which
women (and purveyors of smoking) reworked the ideology of smoking
decades later to encompass women in this distinctive consumer culture
between the wars.
All of these works argue that the pathfinders who first articulated
womens right to smoke were members of the middle and upper classes
who were untrammelled by conventional notions of decorum25 for
women, such as actresses, intellectuals, and new women. After all,
these were the leaders of the 19th- and early 20th-century enfrachisement campaigns and other public-sphere campaigns which demanded
the right to enter the professions, hold membership in artistic associations, and much else. It is not surprising that early examples of women
pushing the boundaries of acceptable behaviours like smoking were
women of privilegeintellectuals, artists, society women, and the like.
The same process was at work in the masculine world of smoking with
elitist elements arguing first for snuff, then cigars, pipes, and finally cigarettes. But to profit from the much larger consumer market represented
by all women, tobacco advertisers and denizens of popular culture
needed to democratize their claims and engage more than those few
who were consciously pushing at restrictive social conventions. Taking
the British example as a case in point, Matthew Hilton has argued that
cigarette producers had no choice after World War I but to engage an
army of smokers, women included. The success of the American Bonsack
cigarette-making machine, and other versions which followed it, meant
that a mass demand had to be created to consume the inexpensive
mechanically produced cigarettes.26 The same problem faced North
American cigarette producers.27
This paper explores the roots of the courtship and adoption of smoking by Canadian waged and salaried women during the interwar period.
It does not argue that these were the only, or indeed, the first women to
smoke, but rather that their appearance as a growing demographic with
disposable cash and a need to develop their own rituals for a new age
made them an ideal host for this daring act. Encompassed within this
group of smokers were both line waged workers and the newly minted
salaried professionals of such rising occupations as Social Work. We have
suggestive evidence about the choices made by professional working
women and waged employees in semi-skilled and unskilled labour, in
the service sector, commercial and financial offices. It can be hypothesized that the decision to smoke by the working woman involved an
interplay of personal, cultural, and technological forces. The single most
important factor of their lives was some disposable cash which could
be used to purchase cigarettes. At the same time, working women of
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any station were engaged in more tenuous employment positions than

their male counterparts and smoking represented for them both pleasure
and danger. How were these mixed motives presented to women? If
one promise made of smoking was a perception of greater sophistication,
the obverseunrespectabilitywas a major threat. How was respectability itself reconfigured in this transitional period?
To be sure, there is much about the experience of smoking for waged
or salaried women in the past that we still do not know. Despite cigarettes cheapness, we have limited evidence for Canadian women of
which products women wedged into their budgets, and which they
denied themselves.28 We have only general estimates of how much the
typical female smoker consumed, especially in relation to her male counterpart. Yet the cultural depiction of the woman smoker is rich in this
period, allowing some gaps to be filled. The woman smoker was treated
in the interwar period in family and womens magazines, in advice literature and medical commentary, on billboard advertising, street-level
advertisements, newspapers and material culture, including clothing,
accessories, cosmetic, and decorative objects. It was also presented in
the newly developing film industry by American and European film
stars, and watched avidly by Canadian women; it was portrayed as well
in the pages of popular novels and in the pulp fiction industry. Oral
histories collected with women who came to maturity during this period
demonstrate that powerful messages found their way into waged
womens consciousness. Norms which increasingly accepted womens
smoking were all developing against a backdrop of the negative, 19thcentury anti-smoking advice literature for serious young women.
Despite widespread assumptions in the literature then and since that the
anti-cigarette message had been blown away by the roaring twenties
and the image of the boyish flapper, arguments from this older prescriptive code remained very much in the public mind, especially as
these were applied to waged or salaried women.29
This examination is limited in a variety of ways. First, the discussion is
rooted in the historical representation of English-Canadian women in
the south, despite the undoubted application of many of the features of
the debate as well to Quebec and to the North.30 In the case of Quebec,
Jarrett Rudys detailed study of the contested nature of womens smoking in Quebec society has done much to provide insight into how the
woman smoker was represented in that cultural setting. Secondly, by
considering the case in the interwar period between 1919 and 1939, the
dramatic increase of womens rates of smoking which occurred during
World War II and which infused the culture of North America and western Europe with images of the glamorous woman smoker has been omitted for several reasons. By 1945, examples of women of all classes smoking were ubiquitous, as can be seen in Figure 1, obscuring the process by
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which the personal decisions to smoke and the marketing campaigns

had been accomplished. This paper focuses directly on the birth of a
practice well advanced by World War II.
Thirdly, the list of cultural products consulted for this study does not
claim to be complete, even if extensive. The question of what waged or
salaried women read for instruction and leisure is by no means clear.
During this period, there were no labelled working womens magazines in Canada; in fact, the two most popular womens magazines of
the era were The Chatelaine, introduced in March 1928, and the Canadian
Home Journal, founded in 1910.31 Both have been used intensively
because of their low subscription and counter costs (among the lowest of
Canadian subscription rates at no more than $1.00 yearly through to
the end of the 1930s) and because of their large circulation numbers,
suggesting that working women in both waged jobs and salaried professions read these magazines for pleasure and direction. Certainly, both
magazines aimed to capture the working woman in their readership,
most particularly The Chatelaine through the late 1920s and early 1930s.32
As well, The Business and Professional Woman existed from 1930, the official
journal published by the Canadian Federation of Business and Professional Women.33 Offering reports from its local groups in such places as
Brandon, Saint John, and Ottawa, from its national executive and its
annual conventions from 1928, the journal represented the salaried business and professional elite, and aimed to place political pressure on legislators on behalf of professional women. It also provided diverting and
instructive activities for the working womans leisure hours, and celebrated achievements on behalf of all Canadian women. It carried advertisements from April 1932 onwards, of life insurance dealers, suitcase
manufacturers, vacation sites and respectable hotels for business travel,
gasolene stations and beauty products, including slimming corsets. At
once conservative in social policy, and radical in its support for the international peace process and disarmament, The Business and Professional
Woman began to carry cigarette advertising in March 1933.34 At the other
literary extreme, pulp fiction was popular with working-class males, and
could easily have been read as well by the women in these households.35
Here too the data is suggestive rather than definitive. This paper will use
a selected sample of cultural references, including both womens and
family magazines and popular movie icons of the era, to uncover the layers of prescription presented about the woman smoker.
It is also important to define the women at the core of this study. To be
a waged or salaried woman during the 1920s and 1930s did not necessarily place one in the working class in cultural terms, though statistically, this was usually the case. Of the complete female workforce for
whom we have statistics, professionals accounted in 1921 for about 19%,
sliding by 1931 to 17.6% and 15.3% by 1941.36 About half of women
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engaged in waged labour between 1921 and 1941 worked in clerical,

trade, transportation, and manufacturing jobs. In 1921, 49.6% of the
female workforce was clustered in these sectors; by 1931, it had fallen to
43.9% (mainly as a result of more women moving into domestic service
in the early years of the depression), and by 1941, it had climbed back up
to 47.3%.37 Thus, throughout the interwar period, line workers and professionals between them constituted approximately 61 to 68% of female
waged and salaried workers. Based on interviews with women who
began smoking in this period, and on the evidence provided by trades
magazines, these are the working women who were targeted by popular representations of smoking. Undoubtedly there was also a segment of
the salaried professional class who took up smoking in this period, as
autobiographies and personal accounts attest. The courting of and representation of female workers, where evidence of their public smoking
did not result in firing, is the focus of this study. Hence, women in teaching or nursing or engaged as domestics are not included. All of these
occupations specifically forbade women smoking, as they depended on
19th-century notions of purity which smoking (or drinking) denied.38
Those working in clerical or service occupations, such as stenography or
waitressing, and at all levels of the hierarchy were prime objects. Women
engaged in waged or salaried work for this study must have been
engaged in the public sphere. In these settings, where women were
establishing a public personae, the dimensions of respectability and danger are more easily deciphered. These women were in the main single:
postwar legislation in 1921 dramatically narrowed the possibilities of
married womens waged work.39 Finally, the majority of these women
were young. In 1921, of the total female workforce, 69.4% were between
ages 14 and 24; by 1931, the percentage in this youthful age-group in
waged or salaried labour had reached 73.9% and by 1941, the rate of
youthful female labour had declined only slightly to 73.7%.40
This study aims to consider waged and salaried womens choices to
begin smoking within a cultural context. One set of meanings from stylized and repetitive images and actions have been suggested by sociologist Judith Butler.41 She argues that repetitions of acts, both social and linguistic, eventually take on the power of ritual, creating a kind of social
magic,42 for the performer. Such repetitive acts have particular meaning
for the socially disenfranchised, creating behavioural codes which, she
argues, constitute the person and which can eventually take on hegemonic authority in cultural terms. Butler s insights are applied most
often to social roles which are transgressive or boundary-breaking,
such as women first taking up public smoking after 1918, or women at
the forefront of the revolution in waged labour. By the end of World
War II, young working women had succeeded in making such behaviour
both accepted and even expected. As one working woman reports, who
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learned to smoke in that period, we all smoked everywhere all the

time.43 Nevertheless, it is unlikely that working women smoked without
sanction in the open. More possible was smoking in the semi-seclusion
of the workplace, as can be seen in Figure 2 where Mrs. Joyce Jones,
shipyard rivet passer, takes a smoke break with Len Christianson on the
work site during World War II.44 At breaks, lunch, and after-work socializing at such places as the lounge in clubhouses such as the Montreal
Business and Professional Womens Club45 or in the protected setting
of cigar stores which had tried to make their surroundings more agreeable to women with soda fountains, stationery, lending libraries, and
smoking space,46 women smokers could find acceptable spaces for smoking. In this period too, however, cigarette smoking developed its own
distinctive purposes, as well as consumption styles. Matthew Hilton
suggests that while pipes and cigars were marketed to bring relief from
the cares of the world, cigarettes were to control that world by reducing
stress.47 In this period for the first time, cigarettes were marketed and
used symbolically as a way of coping with the modern, fast-paced world,
not to be smoked only during rest periods, but continuously. Women
came to public smoking just as this process was underway, suggesting
further ways that public smoking was a risky act, particularly for the
woman with limited authority. It held both promise and fantasy of a
sophisticated life modelled on middle-class norms but supported by
working-class wages and reinforced by popular cultural iconography.
THE CULTURAL REWARDS OF SMOKING FOR WAGED WOMEN
The post-World War I era was the first period when sizable numbers of
women took up smoking, although how many exactly is a point of
debate. Despite the lack of statistics for women smokers before 1935 in
the United States, contemporaries asserted that the quadrupling of cigarette sales in the United States between 1918 and 1928 was due in part
to the advent of the woman smoker. One estimate puts the percentage of
women smokers at 5% in 1923 and 12% in 1929.48 Another source puts
the figure at 18% of American women smoking by 1935.49 Indications
from the first survey of women smokers in Montreal in 1947 were that
almost half of the women who responded declared themselves to be
smokers.50 A private survey conducted by the Canadian Daily Newspaper Association in 1956 indicated that about 68% of francophone women
in Montreal and 28% of anglophones admitted to smoking.51 Official
statistics for Canadian smokers are not available before 1965, by which
time about 39% of women smoked.52 In none of these estimates is there
a distinction by class, waged, or salaried work. Clearly, however, until the
mid 1970s, the rates of womens smoking climbed. Thus, while the
majority of women remained non-smokers between 1919 and 1939, the
interwar period was the crysallis for this public act.
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Figure 2
Library Archives Canada, Women Shipbuilders, Vancouver, B.C. during World War II, PA
108049 (EN 44).
What recommended the act of smoking for that growing minority of

women? To consider cosmetic reasons, the accessorizing of cigarettes
allowed women to add dramatic details to their wardrobes at little
expense. In his study of the 19th-century British male smokers paraphernalia of smoking consumption, Matthew Hilton argues that the
amassing of the pipes, pipe holders, storage jars, tobacco pouches, smoking armchairs, slippers, jackets, hats, and much else might seem irrational in expressing a smokers identity, and yet as a group, these objects
constructed a distinctive picture of the smoker as different from everybody else.53 For women in the interwar period, however, it offered even
more. It allowed the woman smoker to construct a co-ordinated fashionable, sophisticated and even edgy image for herself through
wardrobe details, domestic articles, and gestures. For example, with
ones wardrobe, decorative cigarette cases could be chosen to match and
set off a particular costume, or holders in fine materials like wood and
ivory, or cheaply produced to match a particular outfit extended the
length of the cigarette, protected the fingers from nicotine stains and
could accent a particular colour in the wardrobe. These holders were
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SHARON ANNE COOK
often kept in perfumed delicate boxes.54 Perfumed and tinted cigarette

ends were produced to match a womans lipstick or her nail enamel.
An additional array of inexpensive products also were produced to grace
the working-girls home. Decorative cigarette containers were manufactured for the coffee table, such as the cigarette holders shown in Figure 3. Cigarette dishes to match fine tea sets were available too as with
the popular Blue Mikado China shown in Figure 3 and owned by many
Eastern Canadian working women.55 Monogrammed cigarettes were
reportedly given as guest favours, according to the newspapers of the
day.56 One could buy specialized lines of clothing, including light-weight
smoking tunics which mimicked mens smoking jackets. Thus, products
ranged from modest to expensive to support the woman smoker in
accessorizing her home or apartment.
Figure 3
Collection of Linda Kupecek, Calgary, Alberta. Beige/brown celluloid cigarette holder

with spring opener, 1930s and crockery cigarette holder and stand, Thistle Design, 1950s,
collection of Sharon Cook, Blue Mikado cigarette dish (EN 55).
Once the wardrobe and home decorating effects had been mastered,
the cigarette itself could serve several purposes. For one, cigarettes had
the advantage of being small enough to allow consumption within a
short break, such as working women took on the job. Sharing a cigarette
with work-mates in the semi-seclusion of the workplace became a bonding ritual for women, as it had long been for men. Cigarettes also gave a
woman something to do with her hands during after-hours socializing in
other protected leisure settingssuch as cafeswhere the holding and
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displaying of cigarettes, often with decorative holders, made even eating

and drinking a theatrical feminine performance. The introduction of
the cheap, mass-produced cigarette in the 1880s was standardized and
made even more affordable by James Bonsacks cigarette-rolling
machine.57 Packaged cigarettes required a further performance: unwrapping the package, pulling out the single cigarette, positioning it suggestively or furtively on the lips. The refinement of the self-striking match in
the early 20th century meant that lighting the cigarette was a fairly reliable act too. Henceforth, the lit cigarette could act as a prop to aid discussion but not damage clothing. Marketers helped in this process as
well by making cigarettes natural companions coffee and sweets,
thereby further normalizing the previously sinful activity.
The combination of cheap prices, reliable and theatrical possibilities as
a wardrobe prop, duration of the smoking experience and workplace
norms of peer associations help, therefore, to explain cigarettes growing
popularity over cigars and pipes for working women after World War I.
While pipe-smoking had been constructed as an independent masculine
act, it was bulky and cumbersome whereas cigarettes could easily be
carried about in the smart new small handbags. The smaller size of the
cigarette was also thought to complement the smaller female frame and
the aesthetic of a womans decoratively filed and coloured fingernails,
first made popular as well during the 1920s. Womens smoking was coincident with their gaining the federal franchise at the start of this period,
greater social independence, opportunity for peer associations through
urban and rural clubs and in some places night clubs, playing team
sports, and the isolating influence of the automobile. All of these facilitating factors encouraged women to smoke and otherwise extend their
social activities.
Smoking had long been presented as a health risk to young people
and through their weakening, to the nation as a whole. It is not chance
coincidence that the early eugenics movement and anti-smoking campaigns occurred in the same period of late 19th-Canada and elsewhere,58
with anxiety centring on the damage which smoking did to youths. Where
young women were concerned, the legacy of health concerns about smoking was reinterpreted positively with the introduction in the 1920s of a
feminine aesthetic of thinness. Diaphanous fabrics and undergarments
which were less restrictive, but also less helpful in camouflaging a plump
figure, meant that weight control took on a new urgency for all women,
and especially for working women in the public gaze. Images of feminine beauty presented to consumers during this period all emphasize
thin waists, and straight-line flapper thinness for the whole physique.
For young women working in public, smoking came to be seen as a
relatively painless route to control ones weight. If one credits the content
of the increasing number of advertisements in womens magazines dur-
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ing these decades, the female body was perceived as deeply flawed in a
variety of ways. Control of the female bodys shape, size, odour and
colour (of teeth, hair, fingernails, facial blotches) were all strongly recommended to women if they hoped to become or remain married or
befriended. The pressure to be slender was simply one rule among many
for the public woman, as is still the case,59 and it was a standard which
could be more easily reached through smoking. When the American
Tobacco Company advertisements for Lucky Strike made the claim of
tobacco as an appetite suppressor through their slogan: Reach for a
Lucky, instead of a sweet, the association was explicit. Readers of movie
magazines would have learned that Greta Garbo, fresh from her triumph in The Torrent (1925) was reportedly warned by Louis B. Mayer on
her introduction to the American Cinema business that American men
dont like fat women. Preparing for her new role in Flesh and the Devil
(1927), Garbo, a heavy smoker, promptly lost weight,60 partly by replacing food with cigarettes.
Another Canadian advertisement which confirmed the representation
of the slender image of smokers dates from between 1931 and 1933 and
promoted Winchester Cigarettes (see Figure 4). A prototype of sexual
attractiveness is this young model with her casual, fresh-faced beauty.61
She exudes confidence, her slenderness profiled with her cigarette. At the
same time, the young woman has a middle-class, girl-next-door quality
to her, making her a template and an attainable look that is well within
range for the style-conscious young waged women. Still, she is undeniably sexy, even glamorous and independent as she sits with her cigarette
resting on a carelessly poised knee, arm thrown across the chair back in
an expansive posture which would have worried her W.C.T.U. grandmother deeply. She says nothing, simply posing with a frank, open look.
Very importantly, she is not a recognizable screen star; she could be any
young working girl, eager to demonstrate her readiness for fun and
pleasure. The young womans image is striking too because of the degree
of languor she shows. This too must have fed a desire by hurried working women for a simple relaxant to be found in a cigarette. The same
theme is taken up with the Sweet Caporal advertisement, shown in Figure 5 from the Canadian Home Journal of 1938.62 Here two friends walk an
Afghan Dog, a classic pure-bred, the women dressed almost identically
in conservative suits, perched hats and corsage along an elegant stairway. The cigarette, not shown in this case, promises happiness, further
explicated in the copy as that something that so many smokers want.
These relaxed representations of women with upscale accoutrements
seems to relate more to a sedate middle-class life, and is certainly at
direct variance with the experience of harried office workers who regularly endured periods of speed-up, unpaid overtime, long hours, and
fines.63 It is both ironic and suggestive of deeper class desires at work in
this faux representation of leisured young smokers.
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Figure 4
Winchester Cigarettes girl City of Toronto Archives, SC 488, 4294, 1931-33 (EN 61).
Figure 5
Step out to Happiness! Canadian Home Journal, May 1938 (EN 62).
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Clerks, service-workers, and professionals in newly defined fields

would all have experienced high levels of stress, little workplace control
over their work lives and the clear necessity to develop discipline over
emotions and mood in order to demonstrate responsible demeanor.
There is evidence too of social isolation, particularly during the depression. A Professional Woman, in a letter to an advice columnist bemoans
the lack of male friends for women between 30 and 40 because males fear
that they will be pressed into marriage when they cannot afford it during these depressed times. We have our professions, or our jobs, and
we want to make good in them. But there is no denying that men-friends
are jolly and stimulating, and that, in spite of all our modern ways, there
are times and occasions when a male escort is both necessary and entertaining.64 Then, as today, high stress levels, mood swings, and the desire
to control appetite are given as important reasons why young women
are drawn to smoking.65 Commentary from the period, including Nellie
McClungs column in MacLeans, testify to the many biases which kept
the working woman alert to undermining factors. She noted that
[t]he emancipations of women came with the typewriter and the introduction
of electricity to the home, and to-day the trade winds have carried her a long
way on the road to self-determination. But these same winds, strong as they
are, have not entirely blown away all the prejudices that have grown up
around women during the long years of their economic dependence.66
Veronica Strong-Boag has demonstrated that despite the marked

increase of women in the workforce after 1921, their right to waged
labour remained contested, with those acting outside the normative
boundaries especially vulnerable. 67 Paid work also required that workers suppress negative emotions, another quality which modern women
offer as justification for smoking.68 To facilitate the social exchange working women understandably craved, to control weight, mood and anxiety,
some waged women chose to smoke. Having accepted some of the
advantages of smoking early, then repeating the performance over and
over, it should not be surprising that for many of these waged or salaried
women, tobacco offered a rare, comforting sense of authority in a potentially hostile environment.
THE CULTURAL DANGERS OF SMOKING FOR WAGED WOMEN
Before World War I, cigarette smoking, particularly for women, had a

disreputable reputation. In the 19th century, tobacco use was grouped in
the public mind through educational and journalistic discourse with alcohol, opium, and other drugs in the demi-monde subculture. Rumours
often circulated that cigarettes were laced with opium.69 The first objective
of cigarette marketing to women in the 1920s, therefore, was to dissociate
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it from its 19th-century partners in crime, and to forge new connections

to 20th-century consumer society. However, such a transgressive act carried out in the presence of other unrespectable or barely respectable
activities such as drinking alcohol or frequenting nightclubs, meant that
smoking continued to carry the burden of its declass company.
Until World War II, popular cultural sources warned young women
that the social risks of smoking in public were considerable. The fantasy presented by advertisers and some image-makers of the period was
that smoking would imbue the young woman with sexuality, slenderness, and sophistication. Arrayed against this easy route to modernity
was an older and still vigorous message of respectability rooted in 19thcentury norms and closely identified with middle-class life. It was presented to women through prescriptive warnings in womens magazines
and journals, novels, and cinema. Here, young women were warned
that these aims of modernity were errant and that women pursuing
them would end in self-absorption and ruin. For example, contributors to
The Business and Professional Woman recounted their clubs activities: in
1938, for example, the Brandon members heard a lecture on personality, and held a luncheon and tea party; the Guelph Club sponsored a
Flower picture exhibit in a local hall and sponsored a scholarship, while
the Edmonton Club held an International Banquet with Mr. Eddie Wong
as guest speaker on How to Know China and the Chinese.70 The major
initiative of that year for the Canadian Federation had been the sponsoring and unveiling of a plaque at the entrance to the Senate Chamber
to commemorate the Alberta Five. If one were to compare these national
or local activities of business and professional women with those of the
W.C.T.U. in the 1890s,71 they would not look much different. Yet the
Business and Professional Woman regularly carried cigarette advertisements too, as the W.C.T.U. journal decidedly did not. The new code of
sophistication for working women shared much with the past, with the
notable addition of smoking.
This clash of cultures, choosing from both the old prescription and the
new, helped to feed the sense of danger for those women who smoked.
This exciting sense of endangerment and rebellion was also associated
with the public woman smoker and strongly represented in popular
culture. Racy women involved in sexual indiscretions, or violent criminals were often shown as smokers throughout this period in Canadian
pulp fiction.72 Illustrations of the woman smoker appeared in highly
stylized drawings from Canadian pulp art magazines, but never as naturalized photographs.73 The pulp magazine covers which flourished
throughout World War II, are representative of this pattern.74 The power
of this illustration is undeniable, marking the handsome woman as
aggressive, destructive and fantastically exciting, but hardly a model for
the girl next door, or the waged woman.
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Much of the popular fiction of the day also belied the commonplace
act of smoking. Heroines in such popular novels as Frances Hodgson
Burnetts The White People,75 published in 1917 but still avidly read during
the 1920s were serious, book-loving, and dutiful. Nary a cigarette is to be
found in these pages. Not even pulp fiction celebrating the Mounties
from the 1930s features smokers among the chaste women or the men in
scarlet who protect them.76 Thus if smoking were to become a mass
experience, the danger would need to be blunted in favour of the promise. This was the task of advertisers.
The image of the sophisticated, upper middle-class woman smoker
makes an appearance in Susan Ertzs best-selling novel, Madame Claire,
published in 1923.77 As Mary Vipond reminds us in her survey of popular novels in English Canada during the 1920s, the book industry helped
to spread mass culture through reprints of popular American and British
works, such as Ertzs and the many books written by Burnett. Rental or
lending libraries in bookstores and American institutions like the Bookof-the-Month Club placed novels of this type fairly readily in the hands
of consumers, especially those with modest means.78 Ertzs central character, Madame Claire, is the elderly, gracious, and improbably wise matriarch of a large family of upper middle-class English. The widow of a
former ambassador, she lives well in a London hotel suite, attended by a
loyal maid and by a large, troubled family intended to represent many of
the new centurys flash-points. Most problematic by far is Madame
Claires daughter, Connie, a faded beauty fatally attracted to abusive,
charming, and glossy men who woo her, take her money, and leave her
for a younger version of herself. Of all the women in Ertzs novel, Connie alone smokes, and she smokes a great deal: perfumed cigarettes in
public places. Despite the difficulties Connie causes for her family, and
indeed, for herself, she has lived an undeniably exciting life. She had the
prettiest and weakest mouth, and the most irresistible blue eyes that
ever gave delight to a painter of pretty women. She had a very small
share of wit, but with women like Connie, a little wit goes a long way.79
She values allure and magnetism in all of her relationships, dresses
beyond her means, and spends most of her time seeking happiness.
at any rate, I have lived she notes reflectively to her brother, who has
come yet again to rescue her. Lived! he retorts, You surely dont call
that living? Junketing around Europe with a lot of bounders!80 But Connie certainly favours this up-scale life to the one lived by her mother,
holding to the old code of maternal order and duty. Many working
women might well have agreed with Connie in her aims, yet Ertzs novel
stands as a clear warning of the price to be paid by living this way.
Connie is not the only model for young womanhood provided by
Ertz, however. Madame Claires granddaughter, Judy, offers another
image of independent womanhood, very much on the model of the
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woman who might read The Business and Professional Woman. She sometimes wakes at night in a sort of fever, hagridden by the thought that she
may have made a mess of her life by not marrying this man or that,
fearful that she may never meet the right one at all, hating the thought
of spinsterhood, and, she says, seeing nothing else for it.81 Judy has a
mind of her own, refuses to conform in many ways, I shall begin
signing myself, Judy Pendleton, V.F.C. Virgin From Choice. Doesnt it
sound charming?82 Still, Judy eschews smoking. Her independence is
telegraphed through a variety of activities which push boundaries but
which are not, it is made clear, unrespectable. Even though Ertzs
novel is intended to be escapist literature, if its only cigarette-smoking
woman is caricatured as pathetically muddle-headed, irresponsible, and
incompetent with all the advantages of a comfortable birth and family
network, working women would have read the woman smoker as flirting with danger. But to be deterred from smoking in public is not to say
that many women rejected the entire image of smoking as an empowering act. Rather it might only have made them more cautious.
Despite the characterization of the 1920s as a pleasure-seeking period
during which Victorian respectability was jettisoned, because of their
relatively unstable hold on employment and the social isolation that
came with negotiating new paths, most young waged and salaried
women were deeply concerned about how they were perceived.
Respectability, even if it were defined more loosely than its 19th-century predecessor, was still important to them. There is new evidence of
how easily young working-class women smokers could undermine their
own position. Penny Tinklers analysis of portrayals of British workingclass women smokers as barely respectable into the 1960s demonstrates
the chasm between advertisers claims for using a product, and public
perceptions of the impact of that product on a womans social standing.
Tinkler demonstrates as well the particular difficulty of working-class
women smokers in being thought refined.83 In this case, the challenge for
British women was even greater than for Canadian women smokers,
but the social danger suggested by the dissonance of advertisers and
public perceptions is instructive.
THE 20TH-CENTURY WAGED WOMAN: CONSTRUCTING A CODE OF
SOPHISTICATION
John Burnham has argued that the fundamental change to occur after
World War I in the prescriptive behavioural code for all Americans was a
movement away from respectability towards one of pleasure-seeking.84 There is much to support this contention in its application to
Canadians of this period as well, and particularly to women, who, in the
19th century, had been charged with the Victorian doctrine of being the
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angel in the house, responsible for increasing personal respectability as

an indication of the familys social standing. The postwar revised definition for respectability included pleasure over duty, self-gratification
over personal salvation. However, judging from prescriptive literature
and popular culture, the new behavioural code constructed around the
modern Canadian woman was one which redefined respectability by
adding to it a component of sophistication. The act of smoking seemed
to place this embodied sophistication, and thereby elevated status,
within the reach of any waged woman. Cigarette producers took pains
to represent their advertisements as models for the sophisticated and
middle-class modern woman. MacDonalds Tobacco, in a multiple 1937
advertisement for British Consols, Export A Filter Tip and MacDonalds
Menthol Cigarettes showed three mature, well-dressed, and carefully
coifed women whose sophisticated bearing would have been inspirational for those seeking middle-class examples for office or home85 (see
Figure 6). Thus the new prescription included pleasure-seeking, but did
not abandon respectability completely. It especially emphasized the middle-class status of women smokers.
The older prescription of respectability as defined by and against
which the woman smoker was constructed, dated from the 1870s when
groups like the Canadian Womans Christian Temperance Union defined
a code of respectability with anti-smoking figuring prominently in its
agenda for a changed society.86 The official paper of the Dominion [Canadian] W.C.T.U., the Womans Journal, condemned women who chose to
lay aside their flannels for an evening, bare the upper part of their
chests and the greater part of their arms, leave their own warm apartments and promenade in cold banqueting rooms as profligate, self-centred, and disturbingly secular.87 Their prescriptions sought to create a
new behavioural code for the middle-class woman. The messages presented by groups like the WCTU had constituted in their heyday another
example of what Butler calls social magic in which serious young
women helped to redraw acceptable public roles for women of their
day by insisting on respect and a measure of public recognition. They
did so by fashioning a broad program of social activism, including the
elimination of alcohol abuse, the scourge of smoking, and male violence,
and the protection of abandoned women, children, and the working
woman. Commitment to campaigns of this type made women feel
needed, important, and capable. In their time, they were a force to be
reckoned with, and they knew it. Womens temperance agitation was an
empowering ethic, not a diminishing one. But it required that its proponents feel a sense of superiority, even a mission to tolerate the criticism, and worse that they received as they struggled to end violence
and poverty associated with drink, tobacco, and lethargy. However, this
was not a program with which many waged or salaried women could
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Figure 6
MacDonalds: A Cigarette for Every Taste! Canadian Home Journal, June 1937, 64 (EN 85).
identify easily, and by the end of World War I, temperance was largely a
spent force.88
Groups like the WCTU had been supported in their work also by the
force of evangelical religion. Yet in this regard too, the old world of religious certainties was passing away, especially, it has been argued, for the
new working classes.89 Far from the evangelical consensus of the 19th
century when most Protestant Canadians lived by and through their
religion, making it the foundation of much of the social activism of the
era, religiously minded Protestants of the early 20th century were
increasingly shut out from modern life and entertainment.90 Religion
looked dowdy and out of date to many after World War I. The new soci-
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ety was hedonistic, committed to consumerism,91 and prone to quickly

changing fashion. In the pages of womens magazines like The Chatelaine and the Canadian Home Journal, religion made only scant appearance
as part of the modern womans role, and it is missing as well from The
Business and Professional Woman. More commonly, leadership was defined
in all of these periodicals through clubs like the Canadian Federation of
Business and Professional Women, the International Order of the
Daughters of the Empire and the Womens Institutes, and through the
new helping professions such as social work.92
Womens roles in this secularized, acquisitive, and urbanized culture
were profoundly changed from those set out by such middle-brow cultural leaders as the W.C.T.U. Where those women had defined themselves in terms of broad social change, postwar Canadian authorities
called on them to become junior partners in public life through the portal of shopping as the familys consumer specialists. In this light, the
triumph of womens formal enfranchisement in the waning days of
World War I is mitigated by her implication in a culture which valued
women in a kind of perpetual adolescence. The new beauty cult underscored in the new woman the importance of youth,93 including unlined
faces and sparkling white teeth, adolescent energy levels and prepubescent slimness. The societal ethic of sophistication offered a route to a
reinscribed respectability for the waged and salaried woman and presented alluring possibilities for creating social magic, subverting the
prescriptive code once again. The image of the independent, sophisticated but disciplined working woman smoker was inserted into a larger
canvas of optimistic Canadian development and carefully nurtured by
advertisers of many products, tobacco included.
POPULAR CULTURES CONTRIBUTION TO THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE
WOMAN SMOKER
The prescription for sophistication as presented by popular cultural texts

seemed simple enough. Wages or a salary allowed a woman the means
to buy attractiveness through the redesign of her body, her calculated
gestures, and her accessories. It brought her interesting and entertaining
friends of both sexes. The working woman could see that long-repressed
sexuality could be (carefully) used to her advantage through the act of
smoking. By combining images rooted in middle-class lifestyles with ones
typical of the working experience, popular culture showed how the
waged or salaried woman could elevate her station in life and her stock of
sophistication by altering her appearance and immediate environment.
Any young woman taking in one of the inexpensive movies of the era
could see that smoking made one appear sexy. These carefully constructed, international sources taught young women how to sexualize
gestures through smoking, but also to carefully skirt the disreputable.
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Figure 7
Mary Astor, Poster for White Shoulders (EN 94).
Figure 8
Claudette Colbert still image, 1938 (EN 95).
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Cinema icons like Mary Astor (Figure 7) from the 1931 movie, White
Shoulders94 or Claudette Colbert (Figure 8) ) in a screen star photograph from 193895 were presented to avid viewers as edgy sophisticated
models who could be emulated and identified as middle-class through
their wardrobes, speech and behaviours. Both Astor s and Colberts
dressesdaring but within the bounds of convention for the period
their self-assured holding high the cigarette, their carefully pencilled
brows and made-up eyes could all be copied. Their performances literally taught audiences how the new woman should pose with cigarette as
stage prop, how she might speak, dress, move.96 Patterns of behaviour
associated with smoking, for example the theatrical lighting of the cigarette, could best be mastered by learners where repeated viewings or
readings allowed consumers to memorize and then mimic the ritualized performance. Selecting the cigarette, lighting it, or having it lit for
her, arching her neck so that the head tilted in a provocative pose, wrist
raised, fingers framing the cigarette which is held aloft like a flag
required much practice to be convincing. This same basic sexualized
and sophisticated pose is struck, time and again in cinema productions,
posters, magazine advertisements, and elsewhere. Even the woman who
lit up for herself could easily telegraph a sexualized message. Used in
tandem with buffed and polished fingernails, cigarettes allowed for
expansive gestures, wordless expression of emotion, and calculated framing of the face with softening exhaled smoke. For the learner to fully
absorb the message, as in any pedagogical circumstance, repeated lessons are necessary. Movies were ideal for this purpose. It has been
argued that in movies of the 1920s, women were presented as smokers
more often even than male villains,97 exhibiting much the same pose as
seen with Astor or Colbert.
In addition to repeated viewings in one media, if rituals are to take
hold, the same performance must be repeated in a variety of media,
with particular stages of the ritual highlighted for new meanings.
Another popular prescriptive source for women during the inter-war
period was short fiction in womens magazines. The Chatelaine ran a
story in 1930 of Jacqueline Dent in You Cant Love the Boss.98 Miss
Dent represents both the waged worker through her past and the
salaried employer through her current status. She could easily be a subscriber to The Business and Professional Woman. She is portrayed as coldly
efficient, cut-throat in her negotiations with suppliers for her perfume
distribution firm and dismissive of her male underlings, who occupy all
the positions in her office from secretary to salesmen. how simple
were men, she muses. All day long in the secluded sanctum of her
office Jacqueline Dent talked with them, outwitted them, struggled with
them, and almost always overcame them. Harvey Stewart, sales manager, acknowledges that there was something unnatural about having a
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girl for a boss. But Harvey has a problem too, as far as Jacqueline Dent
is concerned: he is too much the gentleman, too reserved for modern
commerce. For some unexplained reason, Jacqueline sets out to lure
Harvey to kiss her. She invites him to dinner, then brings him back to her
grand residence, slipping into something a little less formal soon afterwards, and encourages him to join her in smoking. Miss Dents breaking
of middle-class conventions in which she courts her male underling,
bringing him to her residence in a display of sexual availability and completes the performance by inviting him to join her in smoking, clearly
unhinges the victim. He fumbled with a match, and gave her a light.
Over the top of the flame her eyes met his. They were assured, confident,
unembarrassed.99 Or so they seemed at least. The profile drawn here
could be illustrated by either Mary Astor of Claudette Colbert in their
portraits, or any of a number of other cinema stars, like Marlene Deitrich.
Jacqueline and Harvey dance, they embrace, and then suddenly Jacqueline becomes enraged. Clearly, Jacqueline is a conflicted personality who
has confused unbridled sexuality with sophistication. Ignoring the stillintact requirements of respectability, she is made to appear hysterical,
manipulative, and cruel. Her negative signification is most apparent by
the fact that Jacqueline smokes privately, and with a mission, but never
in the workplace she controls. Jacqueline Dent is presented as a failed
personality of a successful waged woman. In the end, Harvey saves
Jacqueline from her prosperous but personally unsatisfying career by
marrying her and sharing the leadership of the firm.
Representations of women smokers such as this one signalled sexual
availability through smoking, but also the need for the truly sophisticated woman to constrain that sexuality. The acceptable limits of sexual
expression were still being defined, but in stories such as Jacqueline
Dents, sexuality as recklessly flaunted seems intended to warn the
reader against an assumption that all of the old rules had disappeared.
They had not, and the new code of sophistication carried with it the
possibility of ruin if not carefully managed. Film stars like Mary Astor or
Claudette Colbert were constructed as sexy, tough, and knowing. But all
of these women were also presented as in control of their fates, already
having succeeded in the modern world of entertainment.
Magazine representations of the real working woman present no hint
of her sexuality. Even where successful waged or salaried women were
profiled, as in the pages of The Business and Professional Woman, readers
were abjured that The Trend for the Mannish Casual was the best
fashion route. The C. H. Smith Company of Windsor Ontario recommended that [t]he most feminine thing to do is to go masculine in
your suits and coatscopy the casual, comfortable mannish styles, so
admirably suited to a busy daya silhouette. Broad shouldered, Square,
Courageous; built of mannish fabrics.100 Helen Gregory MacGills
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Figure 9
Helen Gregory MacGill, The Jobless Woman, The Chatelaine, September, 1930, 5 (EN 101).
heart-rending article of The Jobless Woman in The Chatelaine of September 1930 shows a young woman with a deeply worried expression,
conservative clothing in muted colours, and a drab cloche hat (see Figure
9). While her clothing is not masculine, it is certainly not intended to
draw attention to her body either. The description she provides of opportunities for employment in business for women is bleak: despite the
increased numbers of wage-earning Canadian women in 1930, quoted
by MacGill at 200,000, most were underpaid, employed only during
rush seasons with long and exhausting hours, and then dismissed
during slack periods. MacGill describes the persistent bias and even hostility towards the waged woman, concluding that unless there is a
quickening of social conscience and an awakening of responsibility for
the welfare of the worker in business and industry, little will change.101
By 1937, the situation was even worse, as would be expected. Mary
Sutherland, Chairman of the Advisory Committee for the National
Employment Commission, pointed out in The Business and Professional
Woman that young rural women seeking employment in the cities magnified the problems faced by unemployed or underemployed women
there.102 There can be little doubt that in a period of such instability, a
sexy office worker or corporate boss would endanger her future.
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Not surprisingly, however, the message was mixed. Canadian advertisements of the period showed that smoking made women desirable as
friends to males and other women smokers. A typical Sweet Caporal
advertisement suggested that smoking brought a young woman devoted
suitors. One of its series of stylized images has two pretty line dancers
chatting. I dont know what you see in that big palooka! says one.
Maybe notbut hed give me his last Sweet Cap replies her friend.103
One of only two tobacco advertisements that appeared in The Chatelaine
in these two decades, Ladies Welcome! shows two well-dressed
women companions purchasing cigarettes, presumably for their own
use. One can easily imagine them as work pals dropping by the local
United Cigar Store to stock up. Yet they appear as archetypal middleclass women who could be out shopping, lunching or engaging in any
other normal errand. That the ladies are engaged in an unremarkable
and respectable shopping trip is argued both in text (in every United
Cigar Store courteous salesmen pay special attention to the purchases of
ladies) and illustration (see Figure 10.). The women wear smart,
ready-made coats, modern cloche hats over their bobbed hair, and they
carry clutch purses, possibly with separate compartments for their cigarettes. Such an advertisement was carefully designed to make cigarettes
be seen as both within reach of any working woman, but also as an
everyday task in which respectable women would engage. Friends
would accompany the smoker on her public shopping expedition, and
she would expect to be treated with respect.104
To be influenced by magazine articles, advertisements or movie
icons, one needed to make a purchase. An alternative means to transmit the same message to the young woman, making her way to and
from the workplace, were billboards, a popular advertising device in
many Canadian cities from before 1914. The billboard lacks a textual
context, aside from the few phrases superimposed on it, and in this
way, presents both a more unstructured image for public consumption and also a more democratic one: anyone walking down the street
or riding on a streetcar can take it in: no purchase or special membership is required. Both individually and taken as a group, the repetition of such powerful and didactic images tried to associate middleclass status with smoking by women. Such messages would have
carried particular significance to waged women without the time or
inclination to consume text-based prescriptions.
Many billboard advertisements made the case that women who
smoked were discriminating in dress and make-up, happily coupled,
and confident. Winchester Cigarettes offered this Toronto billboard
advertisement from the mid-1930s with only a two-word descriptor:
Blended Right, as if the women shown smoking would immediately
discern a cigarette falling below this standard105 (see Figure 11). In the
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Figure 10
Toronto Metro City Archives, E. L. Ruddy Collection, Graduate to Grads Cigarettes: The
Height of Good Taste, 1931-1933 (EN 104).
Figure 11
The Chatelaine, March 1928, 69 (EN 105).
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Figure 12
Toronto Metro City Archives, E. L. Ruddy Collection, Winchester CigarettesBlended

Right, 1931-1933 (EN 106).
same period, Grads Cigarettes pictured a graduate in gown and mortarboard, happily clutching her diploma, assured as she was that her brand
of cigarette represented The Height of Good Taste106 (see Figure 12).
These images, and many others accompanying them on billboards or
on wall signs of buildings, made the case that smart, middle-class and
happy women both smoked and were themselves blended right in mixing sophistication, good taste and of course, smoking.
CONCLUSION
In our own era, the woman smoker has once again become an object of
pity and concern by some, and of derision. Women who consciously
endanger their own lives and those of their children by smoking, who
pollute public airspace and surroundings, emanating the distinctive
stench of stale smoke on their bodies and clothing are regarded by many
as irresponsible, weak willed, and declass. But until the last years of the
20th century, through such publications as Ms Magazine, the waged
woman smoker symbolized strength, passion, sophistication and of
course, independence, and even rebellion. That image was first constructed in the 1920s when smoking helped to expand womens performance on the public stage through allowable gestures, objects, and
attitudes, many of them empowering, and some threatening, to the
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waged womans vulnerable economic position. It is not difficult to imagine that the same complex motives impel young womens decisions
today to take up smoking. That few of these attractions are acknowledged in current womens smoking cessation programs might help to
explain the slow decline of smoking in the 20 to 24 age group. For without a doubt, smoking does offer young women an acceptable means to
express their desires for personal and public authority as they struggle to
find their place in the social order. Through ritualized public performances, with the cigarette as an essential stage prop, these young women
lay claim visually to the power of sexual expression, sophistication and
glamour, just as their foremothers of the interwar period experimented
with the same potent mixture.
NOTES
1 I wish to thank Terry Cook and Lorna McLean for their perceptive comments on this
article, and Ken Montgomery for his research aid in tobacco history generally. The
author is indebted as well to the anonymous reviewers on an earlier draft of this
article.
2 See for example, Rob Cunningham, Smoke & Mirrors: The Canadian Tobacco War
(Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1996), p. 65.
3 This analysis is influenced by an argument proposed by Health Canada for the late
20th-century girl and young woman. It proposes that smokings allure offers
support for five psychic needs of young women: acceptable displays of sexuality,
sophistication, status, social acceptability, and slimness, the so-called five Ss.
4 McCord Museum Photograph Collection, View-26566, People-Occupation-Office
821, Interior of office, W. J. Bush & Co., Montreal, QC, 1950.
5 Benjamin Ward Richardson, The Temperance Lesson Book: A Series of Short Lessons on
Alcohol and Its Action on the Body: Designed for Reading in Schools and Families (New
York: National Temperance Society and Publication House, 1883); William Nattress,
M.D. Public School Physiology and Temperance [authorized by the Education
Department, Ontario] (Toronto: William Briggs, Wesley Buildings, 1893); and G. E.
Henderson and Chas. G. Fraser, Physiology and Hygiene Notes (Toronto: The
Educational Publishing Company, 1897).
6 Richardson, The Temperance Lesson Book, p. 98-100.
7 The Womans Journal, 15 November 1899.
8 Mac Levy, Tobacco Habit Easily Conquered (New York: Albro Society, 1916), p. 98.
9 John Harvey Kellogg, Tobaccoism or How Tobacco Kills (Battle Creek, Mich: The
Modern Medicine Publishing Co., 1922), p.104.
10 Pierre Schrmpf-Pierron, Tobacco & Physical Efficiency (New York: Paul B. Hoeber,
1927), p. 46.
11 Robert E. Corradini, Narcotics and Youth Today (New York: Foundation for Narcotics
Research and Information, 1934), p. 102.
12 See for example, Health Canada News Release of 11 August 2005 posted on its
website, www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ahc-asc/media/nr-cp/2005/2005_89_e.html, accessed on 17
August 2006.
13 In 2006, 26% of women aged 18-24 smoked. This figure was an increase over 2005
rates. Health Canada, Tobacco Control Programme Supplementary Tables, CTUMS
Annual Report 2006. Accessed 17 July 2007.
14 See for example, Mixed Messages, Health Canada, Smoking Interventions in the Prenatal
and Postpartum Periods (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1995);
Health Canada, Tobacco Resource Material for Prenatal and Post Partum Providers, A
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15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
397
Selected Inventory (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1995); Health
Canada, Francophone Womens Tobacco Use in Canada (Ottawa: Minister of Supply
and Services Canada, 1996); Health Canada, Women and Tobacco: A Framework for
Action (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1995); and Health Canada, Smoking
and Pregnancy: A Womans Dilemma (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1995).
See for example, Health Canada, Directions: The Directional Paper of the National
Strategy to Reduce Tobacco Use (Ottawa: The Queens Printer, 1993), p. 12-13.
Teen smokers risk breast cancer Globe and Mail, 4 October 2002.
Sharon Anne Cook, Smokin in the Boys Room: Girls Absence in Anti-Smoking
Educational Literature, in Andrea Martinez and Meryn Stuart, eds., Out of the Ivory
Tower: Feminist Research for Social Change (Toronto: Sumach Press, 2003), p. 25-48.
Howard Cox, Growth and Ownership in the International Tobacco Industry: BAT
1902-27, Business History 31, 11, (1989): 44-67; Rob Cunningham, Smoke & Mirrors: The
Canadian Tobacco War (Ottawa: IDRC, 1996); and Richard Kruger, Ashes to Ashes:
Americas Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of
Philip Morris (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
John C. Burnham, American Physicians and Tobacco Use: Two Surgeons General,
1929 and 1964, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 63, 1 (1989): 1-31.
Iain Gately, La Diva Nicotina: The Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World (London:
Simon & Schuster, 2001); Jason Hughes, Learning to Smoke: Tobacco Use in the West
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Robert H. Miles, Coffin
Nails and Corporate Strategies (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1982); Kerry Segrave,
Women and Smoking in America, 1880-1950 (Jefferson, N.C. and London: McFarland,
2005); Cassandra Tate, Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of The Little White Slaver (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999); Penny Tinkler, Refinement and Respectable
Consumption: the Acceptable Face of Womens Smoking in Britain, 1918-1970,
Gender & History 15, 2 (August 2003): 342-60; Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, Smoke and
Mirrors: Gender Representation in North American Tobacco and Alcohol
Advertisements Before 1950, Histoire sociale/Social History 31, 62 (November 1998):
183-222; Larry C. White, Merchants of Death: The American Tobacco Industry (New
York: William Morrow, 1988); and Cheryl Krasnick Warsh and Penny Tinkler, In
Vogue: N. A. and British Representatives of Women Smokers in Vogue, 1920s to
1960s, CBMH/BCHM 24,1 (2007): 9-47.
John C. Burnham, Bad Habits (New York and London: New York University Press,
1993), esp. chap 4; Sharon Anne Cook, Educating for Temperance: The Womans
Christian Temperance Union and Ontario Children, 1880-1916, Historical Studies in
Education/Revue dhistoire de leducation 5 (Fall 1993): 251-77; Sharon Anne Cook,
Ernest Christian Women, Bent on Saving Our Canadian Youth: The Ontario
Womans Christian Temperance Union and Scientific Temperance Instruction, 18811930, Ontario History 86, 3 (1994): 249-67; Joseph Gusfield, The Social Symbolism
of Smoking, in S. Sugarman and R. Rabin, eds., Smoking Policy: Law, Politics and
Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Joseph Gusfield, Contested
Meanings: The Construction of Alcohol Problems (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1996); and Ian Tyrrell, Dangerous Enemies: Tobacco and Its Opponents in Australia
(Sydney: University of New South Wales, 1999).
Cunningham, Smoke & Mirrors; Matthew Hilton, Smoking in British Popular Culture,
1800-2000 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2001); and Veronica StrongBoag, The New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada, 1919-1939
(Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1988): 342-60.
See especially Warsh, Smoke and Mirrors, p. 183-222; and Tinkler, Refinement
and Respectable Consumption, p. 342-60. Also useful is Iain Gately, La Diva Nicotina.
Hilton, Smoking in British Popular Culture; Jarrett Rudy, The Freedom to Smoke: Tobacco
Consumption and Identity (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press,
2005); and Tate, Cigarette Wars.
Hilton, Smoking in British Popular Culture, p. 144.
398
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SHARON ANNE COOK
26 Hilton, Smoking in British Popular Culture, p. 85.

27 Tate, Cigarette Wars, p. 16.
28 The same is true for the more heavily researched British or American woman
smoker. Hilton, chap. 6; and Tate, Cigarette Wars, chap. 4.
29 Tate finds a similar slow pace of acceptance in the United States of cigarette smoking
by either men or women. See, for example, Cigarette Wars, chap. 5.
30 Cunningham, Smoke and Mirrors, p. 286.
31 After the introduction of The Chatelaine in 1928, The Canadian Home Journal competed
fiercely with it. For instance, in 1929, the Journal reported a circulation of 114,987 as
against Chatelaines 74,278. By 1933, they were running neck and neck, with the
Journal figures holding at 203,429 and Chatelaine at 198,303. By the following year,
Chatelaine exceeded the Journals circulation by about 9,000, but they continued in
fierce competition through the period, at which point the Journal again had a
narrow lead. McKims Directory of Canadian Publications, 1928 to 1939.
32 Valerie J. Korineks fascinating study of Chatelaine in the fifties and sixties, Roughing
It in the Suburbs (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), shows the magazine to
have been instrumental in shaping the postwar middle class, but in the earlier
period, Chatelaine pitched its stories to all women, judging from the fiction, advice
columns and advertisements.
33 Library Archives Canada, The Business and Professional Woman, Per.Reg. 9873; A-607. Available from December 1930 as an unpublished newsletter, and from December
1931 as a formal publication, it moved from a newsletter to a journal in September
1934. This journal, published in Winnipeg, Manitoba, was the Canadian branch of
the International Federation of Business and Professional Women, based in London,
England.
34 The first advertisement was for W. D. & H. O. Wills Gold Flake Cigarettesa
shilling in Londona quarter here. The Business and Professional Woman Newsletter,
p. 7. Gold Flake Cigarettes remained the only advertiser for this journal until 1940.
Gold Flake Cigarettes with cork tips were targeted directly to women in this period
of the Wills heavy magazine advertising. In addition to this Canadian journal,
Gold Flakes were advertised in a range of British womens magazines during the
1930s. Hilton, Smoking in British Pop Culture, p. 151.
35 See Carolyn Strange and Tina Loo, True Crime True North: The Golden Age of Canadian
Pulp Magazine (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2004).
36 John H. Thompson and Alan Seager, Canada 1922-1939: Decades of Discord (Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 1985), table X1b, as cited in Strong-Boag, A New Day
Recalled, p. 53.
37 See for example, Strong-Boag, A New Day Recalled, p. 53.
38 For nursing, see Kathryn M. McPherson, Bedside Manners: The Transformation of
Canadian Nursing, 1900-1990 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); for
teaching, see Alison Prentice, From Household to Schoolhouse: The Emergence of
the Teacher as Servant of the State, in Ruby Heap and Alison Prentice, eds., Gender
and Education in Ontario (Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 25-48); for domestic
service, see Marilyn Barber, The Women Ontario Welcomed: Immigrant Domestics
for Ontario Homes, 1870-1930, in Alison Prentice and Susan Mann Trofimenkoff,
eds. The Neglected Majority: Essays in Canadian Womens History, Vol. 2, (Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 1985), p. 102-21.
39 Strong-Boag, A New Day Recalled, p. 62.
40 F. H. Leacy, ed., Historical Statistics of Canada, 2d ed. (Ottawa: Statistics Canada,
1983), Series D107-122.
41 For a complex and revealing argument around the functions and means of
performance for women, particularly transgressive women bridging established
norms of propriety, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminsm and the Subversion of
Identity (London: Routledge, 1990) and Judith Butler, Performativitys Social Magic,
in Theodore R. Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter, eds., The Social and Political Body
(New York and London: Guilford Press, 1996).
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399
42 Butler, Performativitys Social Magic, p. 29-48.

43 Author s interview with respondent 1AA; oral history study with older women
having smoked for 40 years or more.
44 Library Archives Canada, Women Shipbuilders, Vancouver, B.C. during World War
II, PA 108049.
45 See The Business and Professional Woman, June 1934, p. 1.
46 Rudy, Freedom to Smoke, p. 148.
47 Hilton, Smoking in British Popular Culture, p. 55-56.
48 Tate, Cigarette Wars, p. 93-94.
49 Bobbie Jacobson, Beating the Ladykillers: Women and Smoking (London: Pluto Press,
1986), p. 43; About 40% of British women were smokers by 1950.
52 Statistics Canada and Health and Welfare Canada, 1965-1991 in Health Canada,
Directions: The Directional Paper of the National Strategy to Reduce Tobacco Use,
Ottawa, 1993, p. 10.
53 Hilton, Smoking in British Popular Culture, p. 35.
54 Segrave, Women and Smoking in America, p. 58.
55 Collection of Linda Kupecek, Calgary, Alberta. Beige/brown celluloid cigarette
holder with spring opener, 1930s and ceramic cigarette holder and stand, Thistle
Design with faux pearlized finish, 1950s, collection of Sharon Cook, Blue Mikado
cigarette dish; purchased in 1933 by Gladys Killins, teacher. The author wishes to
thank Margaret Carson for this gift.
57 Tate, Cigarette Wars, p. 15-16.
58 Hilton, Smoking in British Popular Culture, p. 75-76.
59 See Lorraine Greaves, Smoke Screen: Women, Smoking and Identity (Halifax: Fernwood
Press, 1995).
60 Chronicle of the Cinema: 100 Years of the Movies (New York: DK Publishing 1995), p. 191.
61 City of Toronto Archives, E. L. Ruddy Co. Collection, SC 488, 4294, 1931-33.
62 Step out to Happiness! Canadian Home Journal, May 1938.
63 Strong-Boag, The New Day Recalled, p. 62. See also Ruth A. Frager, Class, Ethnicity,
and Gender in the Eaton Strikes of 1912 and 1934, in Franca Iacovetta and Mariana
Valverde, eds., Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Womens History (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1992), esp. p. 206.
64 Eleanor Dare, You Were Asking: A Page of Problemspersonal, household and
otherwise, Canadian Home Journal, October 1930, p. 96.
65 C. Chollat-Traquet, Women and Tobacco (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1992),
p. 62.
66 Nellie L. McClung, Ill Never Tell My Age Again! MacLeans Magazine, 15 March
1926, p. 15.
67 Strong-Boag, The New Day Recalled, p. 44-45.
68 Health Canada, Mixed Messages.
70 The Business and Professional Woman, June 1938, p. 2-8.
71 Sharon Anne Cook, Through Sunshine and Shadow: The Womans Christian Temperance
Union, Evangelicalism and Reform in Ontario 1874-1930 (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queens University Press, 1995), p. 114-53.
72 Strange and Loo, True Crime, see for example the cover.
73 It should be noted that in comparison to much pulp fiction in which women are
routinely abused and tortured, Canadian magazines from the 1940s are markedly
less misogynist. See for example, Jean Gregorek, Horror is What a Girl Would
Feel: Narrative Erotics in Depression-Era Pulp Fiction, in Ann C. Hall, Delights,
Desires, and Dilemmas: Essays on Women and the Media (Westport, Conn: Praeger Press,
1998): 3-19.
400
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SHARON ANNE COOK
74 See for example, Library and Archives Canada, Daring Crime Cases, Cover,
November 1949.
75 Frances Hodgson Burnett, The White People (New York and London: Harper and
Brothers, 1917).
76 See for example, Will Murray, Snow Ghost, 1933 reprinted in Don Hutchison, ed.,
Scarlet Riders: Pulp Fiction Tales of the Mounties (Oakville: Mosaic Press, 1998).
77 Susan Ertz, Madame Claire (Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co., 1923).
78 Mary Vipond, Best Sellers in English Canada: 1919-1928, Journal of Canadian Fiction
35/36 (1986).
79 Ertz, Madame Claire, p. 46-47.
80 Ertz, Madame Claire, p. 151.
83 Tinkler, Refinement and Respectable Consumption, 342-60.
84 Burnham, Bad Habits, esp. 1-112.
85 MacDonalds: A Cigarette for Every Taste! Canadian Home Journal, June 1937, p. 64.
86 In this regard, the British temperance movement was different from the North
American. Hilton argues that in Britain, anti-tobaccoism was only ever something
of an extremist fringe of the temperance movement (p. 62). On the contrary, both
the American and Canadian temperance movements generally, and the womens
temperance movement especially through the W.C.T.U. and other associated groups,
such as various Protestant Womens Missionary Societies, targeted tobacco use
directly and effectively. Cook, Through Sunshine and Shadow, especially chap. 5. In
all cases, however, the focus was on juvenile use of tobacco.
87 The Womans Journal, 15 March 1901 quoted in Cook, Through Sunshine and Shadow,
p. 94.
88 Cook, Through Sunshine and Shadow, p. 195-207.
89 David B. Marshall, Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of
Belief, 1850-1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p. 96.
90 There are certainly exceptions to this, of course. A William Aberhart or Aimee
Semple McPherson could still command immense authority through religious
leadership well into the 20th century. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau have
found persistence of religiosity at the root of working-class culture. See their A
Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900-1940
(Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1996), esp. chap 2.
91 See for example, Joan Sangster, Consuming Issues: Women on the Left, Political
Protest, and the Organization of Homemakers, 1920-1960, in Sharon Anne Cook,
Lorna R. McLean and Kate ORourke, eds., Framing Our Past: Canadian Womens
History in the Twentieth Century (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University
Press, 2001), p. 240-47.
92 See for example, The Chatelaine, October 1931, p. 53.
93 Caroline Routh, In Style: 100 Years of Canadian Womens Fashion (Toronto: Stoddard,
1993), esp. 47-66.
94 Poster for White Shoulders Chronicle of the Cinema: 100 Years of the Movies (New
York: DK Publishing, 1995) p. 230.
95 Claudette Colbert, 1938 still, Kobal Collection, image reproduced from K. M.
Kuntz, Smoke: Cigars, Cigarettes, Pipes, and Other Combustible (New York: TODTRI
Press, 1997), p. 100.
96 Gately, La Diva Nicotina, p. 249.
97 Burnham, Bad Habits, p. 98.
98 C. J. Eustace, You Cant Love the Boss, The Chatelaine, June 1930, p. 6-7, 64-65.
99 Eustace, You Cant Love the Boss, p. 64. Text bolded by author for emphasis.
100 The Business and Professional Woman, March 1936, advertisement for the C. H. Smith
Company, Windsor Ontario, p. 5.
101 Helen Gregory MacGill, The Jobless Woman, The Chatelaine, September, 1930, p. 5,
47-48.
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Page 401

102
103
104
105
106
401
The Business and Professional Woman, March 1937, p. 3.

The Canadian Home Journal, May 1936, p. 75.
The Chatelaine, March 1928, p. 69.
CTA, E. L. Ruddy Collection, Winchester CigarettesBlended Right, 1931-1933.
CTA, E. L. Ruddy Collection, Graduate to Grads Cigarettes: The Height of Good
Taste, 1931-1933.

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SHARON ANNE COOK

Sharon Anne Cook, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa.

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SHARON ANNE COOK

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cation. See for example, Figure 1, a typical office interior of the W. J.

McCord Museum Photograph Collection, View-26566, People-Occupation-Office 821,

Cigarette smoking has always carried with it a sense of danger. The

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include the lethal combination created by some oral contraceptives and

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studies draw on popular cultural references to explain the development

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any station were engaged in more tenuous employment positions than

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which the personal decisions to smoke and the marketing campaigns

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engaged in waged labour between 1921 and 1941 worked in clerical,

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learned to smoke in that period, we all smoked everywhere all the

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What recommended the act of smoking for that growing minority of

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often kept in perfumed delicate boxes.54 Perfumed and tinted cigarette

Collection of Linda Kupecek, Calgary, Alberta. Beige/brown celluloid cigarette holder

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displaying of cigarettes, often with decorative holders, made even eating

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Clerks, service-workers, and professionals in newly defined fields

Veronica Strong-Boag has demonstrated that despite the marked

Before World War I, cigarette smoking, particularly for women, had a

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it from its 19th-century partners in crime, and to forge new connections

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angel in the house, responsible for increasing personal respectability as

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