Do only bad girls smoke?

Any woman traveling in autos in Delhi will tell you that men around will stare at her, whether they are in cars, on bikes or sitting on a cycle rickshaw. Now if any woman were to light up a cigarette in an auto, it might as well create a traffic jam.

Cigarettes are a serious health issue, but the moment it is a woman smoking, it becomes more than just a health issue. It becomes a yardstick to judge her character, her morality and even a question on her motherhood capabilities. It is of course assumed that every woman will make a mother and every woman wants to.

For long Hindi movies – since one has seen more of those than movies in other regional Indian languages – have shown only bad girls smoking on screen. The gangster’s moll (Manisha Koirala in Company), the vamp (Nadira, Shree 420), hookers (Sonam, Mittu Aur Sona) and ‘non-Indian’ mothers, meaning mothers who wore Western clothes and were against the norm of a good Indian wife or a good Indian mother (Lilette Dubey, Monsoon Wedding). The association has always been clear: Fallen and bad women smoke, good girls don’t.

While nicotine harms both men and women – women more because our systems, thanks to the uterus and the estrogen, are more sensitive than a man’s – the ISSUE of women and smoking is NEVER just about health. And it’s neither recent nor just relegated to India.

Smart marketing gave cigarettes an image overhaul from being cancer sticks to being ‘torches of freedom’: public relations guru Edward Bernays, dreamed up a campaign where he persuaded a dozen debutantes to light up cigarettes while marching in the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue in 1929 where the attractive young women called their cigarettes “torches of freedom” (courtesy Wall Street Journal, Jan 2008).

Even today many women hold their cigarettes as a symbol of defiance: If a man can, why can’t I? Then there is the entire bit about how cigarettes “help” you retain your figure or get slim. Nicotine kills appetite and many a young thing picks up the habit because she wants to be thin, look good. Do we blame the girls for wanting to look good? Ad after ad, actress after actress and role-model after role-model perpetuates thin-is-beautiful. And sincerely, no matter how many articles say announce that meat-is-back in fashion, NO woman will buy that.

Then there is the bit about fitting-in. With more women heading out in the corporate world – where a large number of men smoke, particularly in India – women join in the smoking-clan as well. Call it peer pressure, call it looking cool, call it wanting to be fit… Cigarettes are being marketed as much more than another habit to pick up and it’s sad.

I have been a smoker and I am trying desperately to kick the habit. My skin has lost its sheen, my hair structure has changed and more than anything else, I confess, I am paranoid that I will put on weight. I know what it feels to be “fat” (political correctness be damned). Yesterday, I wrote ‘smoking is injurious to your character’, do read it. Today, as you read this, I am going to meet a doctor who claims to be able to make me QUIT IN FOUR DAYS. But I know the honest truth – as a friend of mine pointed out – I have to be ready to give it up. I am. Will share the pointers with you by evening…

But more than anything else, let’s please look at cigarettes for what they are: A suicidal bad habit that lasts a lifetime… Whatever life is left after we get hooked to it and let’s try and kick it together. My inspiration is my father, who quit after 32 years of smoking. He didn’t want to… till his nose started bleeding of an internal haemorrhage. Now I am going to get ready to meet the doc, see you later.
_____________________________________________________________________
COURTESY: WALL STREET JOURNAL, JAN 7, 2008 (mailed by Vasundhara on facebook, tks!)

When Worse Than A Woman Who Voted
Was One Who Smoked
January 7, 2008; Page B1
Mrs. William P. Orr was riding in a car on Fifth Avenue in New York City in 1904 when she lit up a cigarette. A policeman on a bicycle ordered her to put it out. "You can't do that on Fifth Avenue while I'm patrolling here," he told her.

Until the late 1920s, a woman who smoked in public was not only considered vulgar, she risked a warning from the police. In 1922, a New York alderman, Peter McGuinness, proposed a city ordinance that would prohibit women from smoking in hotels, restaurants or other public places.

"Young fellows go into our restaurants to find women folks sucking cigarettes," the alderman argued. "What happens? The young fellows lose all respect for the women, and the next thing you know the young fellows, vampired by these smoking women, desert their homes, their wives and children, rob their employers and even commit murder so that they can get money to lavish on these smoking women."

A Washington Post editorial in 1914 declared, "A man may take out a woman who smokes for a good time, but he won't marry her, and if he does, he won't stay married."

There had been famous high-profile female smokers, of course. In the late 18th century, Rachel Jackson, wife of the seventh president, sometimes handed her pipe to a dinner guest, saying, "Honey, won't you take a smoke?" In the mid-19th century, the French novelist George Sand openly smoked cigars. But before the 1930s, most women smoked only in the privacy of their own homes.

"To smoke in public is always bad taste in a woman," Alexandre Duval, a Parisian restaurateur, said in 1921: "In private she may be pardoned if she does it with sufficient elegance."

World War I drew many women out of their homes to jobs where their co-workers smoked. Americans who traveled abroad, or who entertained foreign guests, saw aristocratic women smoking, often with elegant holders, at dinner parties. The suffrage movement, culminating in the 19th Amendment in 1920, drew attention to other gender inequalities. Smoking became a visible symbol of defiance and feminism.

Working women in New York in the 1920s would sometimes jump into a cab at lunchtime for a private smoke. Upper-class female smokers in Charleston, S.C., at around the same time ordered their cigarettes by mail so the local tobacconist wouldn't know their dirty secret.

But the old ways died hard. In 1920, Hugh S. Cumming, surgeon general of the U.S., warned that "the cigarette habit indulged by women tends to cause nervousness and insomnia and ruins the complexion. This is one of the most evil influences in American life today."

The manager of a Manhattan hotel told a New York Times reporter, "I hate to see women smoking. Apart from the moral reason, they really don't know how to smoke. One woman smoking one cigarette at a dinner table will stir up more smoke than a whole tableful of men smoking cigars. They don't seem to know what to do with the smoke. Neither do they know how to hold their cigarettes properly. They make a mess of the whole performance."

Several women's colleges banned smoking. At Smith College, students seen smoking, even off campus, received a demerit. Three demerits meant expulsion. Bryn Mawr students were prohibited from smoking within 25 miles of the college except in private homes.

In 1921, U.S. Rep. Paul Johnson of Mississippi proposed a bill to make it illegal for "female persons" to smoke in "any public place where two or more persons are gathered together" in the capital. "Regulating smoking by women comes under police power and, as is well known, police powers are practically without limit," he said. (The bill never came to a vote.)

In 1928, the executive board of the Cleveland Boy Scouts recommended that scouts use their influence to discourage women from smoking, saying it "coarsens" women and "detracts from the ideal of fine motherhood." Sioux Falls, S.D., barred billboards picturing women smoking, and Lynn, Mass., banned the showing of films in which women smoked.

Capitalism came to the rescue. Philip Morris brought out a cigarette for women with the slogan "Mild as May." The American Tobacco Co. suggested smoking could make you thin, proclaiming "You can't hide fat, clumsy ankles. When tempted to overindulge, reach for a Lucky."

Finally, a public-relations genius, Edward Bernays, dreamed up a campaign that echoed across the country. He persuaded a dozen debutantes to light up cigarettes while marching in the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue in 1929. The attractive young women called their cigarettes "torches of freedom."

According to a U.S. government estimate, the number of women between 18 and 20 years old who began smoking cigarettes tripled between 1911 and 1925 and more than tripled again by 1939.

Some men who disapproved of women smoking thought it might be the lesser of two evils. "If it were a question between their smoking and their voting, and they would promise to stay at home and smoke," Sen. Joseph Bailey of Texas said in 1918, "I would say let them smoke."