Smoking By Women


Ladies, when pipes are brought, affect to swoon;

They love no smoke, except the smoke of Town.



ISAAC HAWKINS BROWNE, _circa_ 1740.





A story is told of Sir Walter Raleigh by John Aubrey which seems to

imply that at first women not only did not smoke, but that they

disliked smoking by men. Aubrey says that Raleigh standing in a stand

at Sir R. Poyntz's parke at Acton
tooke a pipe of tobacco, which made

the ladies quitt it till he had done. But this objection, whether

general or not, soon vanished, for, as we have seen in a previous

chapter, the gallant of Elizabethan and Jacobean days made a practice

of smoking in his lady's presence. It seems certain, moreover, that

some women, at least, smoked very soon after the introduction of

tobacco; but it is not easy to find direct evidence, though there are

sundry traditions and allusions which suggest that the practice was

not unknown.



There is a tradition that Queen Elizabeth herself once smoked--with

unpleasant results. Campbell, in his History of Virginia, says that

Raleigh having offered her Majesty some tobacco to smoke, after two

or three whiffs she was seized with a nausea, upon observing which

some of the Earl of Leicester's faction whispered that Sir Walter had

certainly poisoned her. But her Majesty in a short while recovering

made the countess of Nottingham and all her maids smoke a whole pipe

out among them. The Queen had no selfish desire to monopolize the

novel sensations caused by smoking. An eighteenth-century writer,

Oldys, in his Life of Sir Walter Raleigh, declares that tobacco

soon became of such vogue in Queen Elizabeth's court, that some of

the great ladies, as well as noblemen therein, would not scruple to

take a pipe sometimes very sociably. But these stories rest on vague

tradition, and probably have no foundation in fact.



King James I in his famous Counter-blaste to Tobacco, hinted that

the husband, by his indulgence in the habit, might reduce thereby his

delicate, wholesome, and cleane complexioned wife to that extremitie,

that either shee must also corrupt her sweete breath therewith, or

else resolve to live in a perpetuall stinking torment. His Majesty's

style was forcible, if not elegant. There are also one or two

references in the early dramatists. In Ben Jonson's Every Man in his

Humour, for instance, which was first acted in 1598, six years before

King James blew his royal Counter-blaste, Cob, the water-bearer,

says that he would have any man or woman that should but deal with a

tobacco-pipe, immediately whipped. Prynne, in his attack on the

stage, declared that women smoked pipes in theatres; but the truth of

this statement may well be doubted. The habit was probably far from

general among women, although Joshua Sylvester, a doughty opponent of

the weed, was pleased to declare that Fooles of all Sexes haunt it,

_i.e._ tobacco.



The ballads of the period abound in rough woodcuts in which tavern

scenes are often figured, wherein pewter pots and tobacco-pipes are

shown lying on the table or in the hands or at the mouths of the male

carousers. Men and women are figured together, but it would be very

hard to find a woman in one of these rough cuts with a pipe in her

hand or at her mouth. An example, in the Shirburn Ballads lies

before me. The cut, which is very rough, heads a bacchanalian ballad

characteristic of the Elizabethan period, called A Knotte of Good

Fellows, and beginning:



_Come hither, mine host, come hither!

Come hither, mine host, come hither!

I pray thee, mine host,

Give us a pot and a tost,

And let us drinke all together._



The scene is a tavern interior. Around the table are four men and a

woman, while a boy approaches carrying two huge measures of ale. One

man is smoking furiously, while on the table lie three other

pipes--one for each man--and sundry pots and glasses. The woman is

plainly a convivial soul; but there is no pipe for her, and such

provision was no doubt unusual.



There is direct evidence, too, besides the story in the first

paragraph of this chapter, that women disliked the prevalence of

smoking. In Marston's Antonio and Mellinda, 1602, Rosaline, when

asked by her uncle when she will marry, makes the spirited

reply--Faith, kind uncle, when men abandon jealousy, forsake taking

of tobacco, and cease to wear their beards so rudely long. Oh, to have

a husband with a mouth continually smoking, with a bush of furs on the

ridge of his chin, readie still to flop into his foaming chops, 'tis

more than most intolerable; and similar indications of dislike to

smoking could be quoted from other plays.



On the other hand, it is certain that from comparatively early in the

seventeenth century there were to be found here and there women who

smoked.



On the title-page of Middleton's comedy, The Roaring Girle, 1611, is

a picture of the heroine, Moll Cutpurse, in man's apparel, smoking a

pipe, from which a great cloud of smoke is issuing.



In the record of an early libel action brought in the court of the

Archdeacon of Essex, some domestic scenes of 1621 are vividly

represented. We need not trouble about the libel action, but two of

the _dramatis personae_ were a certain George Thresher, who sold beer

and tobacco at his shopp in Romford, and a good friend and customer

of his named Elizabeth Savage, who, sad to say, was described as much

given to stronge drincke and tobacco. In the course of the trial, on

June 8, 1621, Mistress Savage had to tell her tale, part of which is

reported as follows:



George Thresher kept a shoppe in Romford and sold tobacco there. She

came divers tymes to his shoppe to buy tobacco there; and sometimes,

with company of her acquaintance, did take tobacco and drincke beere

in the hall of George Thresher's house, sometimes with the said

George, and sometimes with his father and his brothers. And sometimes

shee hath had a joint of meat and a cople of chickens dressed there;

and shee, and they, and some other of her freinds, have dined there

together, and paid their share for their dinner, shee being many times

more willing to dine there than at an inne or taverne.



Elizabeth was evidently of a sociable turn, and though she turned her

nose up at a tavern, there seems to have been little difference

between these festive dinners at Mr. Thresher's shopp, where

Mistress Savage indulged her taste for ale and tobacco, and similar

pleasures at an inn or tavern.



Some of the references to women smokers occur in curious connexions.

When one George Glapthorne, of Whittlesey, J.P., was returned to

Parliament for the Isle of Ely in 1654, his return was petitioned

against, and among other charges it was said that just before the

election, in a certain Martin's ale-house, he had promised to give

Mrs. Martin a roll of tobacco, and had also undertaken to grant her

husband a licence to brew, thus unduly influencing and corrupting the

electors.



Women smokers were not confined to any one class of society. The Rev.

Giles Moore, Rector of Horsted Keynes, Sussex, made a note in his

journal and account book in 1665 of Tobacco for my wyfe, 3d. As from

other entries in Mr. Moore's account book we know that two ounces cost

him one shilling, we may wonder what Mrs. Moore was going to do with

her half-ounce. There is no other reference to tobacco for her in the

journal and account book. Possibly she was not a smoker at all, but

needed the tobacco for some medicinal purpose. There is ample evidence

to show that in the seventeenth century extraordinary medicinal

virtues continued to be attributed to the divine weed.



In some letters of the Appleton family, printed some time ago from the

originals in the Bodleian Library, there is a curious letter, undated,

but of 1652 or 1653, from Susan Crane, the widow of Sir Robert Crane,

who was the second wife of Isaac Appleton of Buckman Vall, Norfolk.

Writing to her husband, Isaac Appleton, at his chamber in Grayes Inn,

as his Afextinat wife, the good Susan, whose spelling is marvellous,

tells her Sweet Hart--I have done all the tobakcre you left mee; I

pray send mee sum this weeke; and some angelleco ceedd and sum cerret

sed. How much tobacco Mr. Appleton had provisioned his wife with

cannot be known, but it looks as if she were a regular smoker and did

not care to be long without a supply. In 1631 Edmond Howes, who edited

Stow's Chronicles, and continued them onto the end of this present

yeare 1631, wrote that tobacco was at this day commonly used by most

men and many women.



Anything like general smoking by women in the seventeenth century

would appear to have been confined to certain parts of the country.

Celia Fiennes, who travelled about England on horseback in the reign

of William and Mary, tells us that at St. Austell in Cornwall (St.

Austins, she calls it) she disliked the custome of the country which

is a universal smoaking; both men, women, and children have all their

pipes of tobacco in their mouths and soe sit round the fire smoaking,

which was not delightful to me when I went down to talk with my

Landlady for information of any matter and customes amongst them.

What would King James have thought of these depraved Cornish folk?

Other witnesses bear testimony to the prevalence of smoking among

women in the west of England. Dunton, in that _Athenian Oracle_ which

was a kind of early forerunner of _Notes and Queries_, alluded to

pipe-smoking by the good Women and Children in the West. Misson, the

French traveller, who was here in 1698, after remarking that

Tabacco is very much used in England, says that the very Women take

it in abundance, particularly in the Western Counties. But why the

_very_ Women? What Occasion is there for that _very_? We wonder that

in certain Places it should be common for Women to take Tabacco; and

why should we wonder at it? The Women of Devonshire and Cornwall

wonder that the Women of Middlesex do _not_ take Tabacco: And why

should they wonder at it? In truth, our Wonderments are very pleasant

Things! And with that sage and satisfactory conclusion to his

catechism we may leave M. Misson, though he goes on to philosophize

about the effect of smoking by the English clergy upon their theology!



Another French visitor to our shores, M. Jorevin, whose rare book of

travels was published at Paris in 1672, was wandering in the west of

England about the year 1666, and in the course of his journey stayed

at the Stag Inn at Worcester, where he found he had to make himself

quite at home with the family of his hostess. He tells us that

according to the custom of the country the landladies sup with

strangers and passengers, and if they have daughters, these also are

of the company to entertain the guests at table with pleasant conceits

where they drink as much as the men. But what quite disgusted our

visitor was that when one drinks the health of any person in company,

the custom of the country does not permit you to drink more than half

the cup, which is filled up and presented to him or her whose health

you have drunk. Moreover, the supper being finished, they set on the

table half a dozen pipes, and a packet of tobacco, for smoking, which

is a general custom as well among women as men, who think that

without tobacco one cannot live in England, because, say they, it

dissipates the evil humours of the brain.



Although, according to M. Misson, the women of Devon and Cornwall

might wonder why the women of Middlesex did not take tobacco, it is

certain that London and its neighbourhood did contain at least a few

female smokers. Tom Brown, often dubbed the facetious, but to whom a

sterner epithet might well be applied, writing about the end of the

seventeenth century, mentions a vintner's wife who, having made her

pile, as might be said nowadays, retires to a little country-house at

Hampstead, where she drinks sack too plentifully, smokes tobacco in an

elbow-chair, and snores away the remainder of her life. And the same

writer was responsible for a satirical letter to an Old Lady that

smoak'd Tobacco, which shows that the practice was not general, for

the letter begins: Madam, Tho' the ill-natur'd world censures you for

smoaking. Brown advised her to continue the innocent diversion

because, first, it was good for the toothache, the constant

persecutor of old ladies, and, secondly, it was a great help to

meditation, which is the reason, I suppose, he continues, that

recommends it to your parsons; the generality of whom can no more

write a sermon without a pipe in their mouths, than a concordance in

their hands.



From the evidence so far adduced it may fairly be concluded, I think,

that during the seventeenth century smoking was not fashionable, or

indeed anything but rare, among the women of the more well-to-do

classes, while among women of humbler rank it was an occasional, and

in a few districts a fairly general habit.



The same conclusion holds good for the eighteenth century. Among women

of the lowest class smoking was probably common enough. In Fielding's

Amelia, a woman of the lowest character is spoken of as smoking

tobacco, drinking punch, talking obscenely and swearing and

cursing--which accomplishments are all carefully noted, because none

of them would be applicable to the ordinary respectable female.



The fine lady disliked tobacco. The author of A Pipe of Tobacco, in

Dodsley's well-known Collection, to which reference has already been

made, wrote:



_Ladies, when pipes are brought, affect to swoon;

They love no smoke, except the smoke of Town.

* * * * * * * * *

Citronia vows it has an odious stink;

She will not smoke (ye gods!)--but she will drink;_



and the same writer describes tobacco as By ladies hated, hated by

the beaux. Although the fine lady may have affected to swoon at the

sight of pipes, and belles generally, like the beaux, may have

disdained tobacco as vulgar, yet there were doubtless still to be

found here and there respectable women who occasionally indulged in a

smoke. In an early _Spectator_, Addison gives the rules of a Twopenny

Club, erected in this Place, for the Preservation of Friendship and

good Neighbourhood, which met in a little ale-house and was

frequented by artisans and mechanics. Rule II was, Every member shall

fill his pipe out of his own box; and Rule VII was, If any member

brings his wife into the club, he shall pay for whatever she drinks or

smokes.



In one of the valuable volumes issued by the Georgian Society of

Dublin a year or two ago, Dr. Mahaffy, writing on the mid-eighteenth

century society of the Irish capital, quotes an advertisement by a

Dublin tobacconist of mild pigtail for ladies which suggests the

alarming question--Did Irish ladies chew?



It has sometimes been supposed that the companion of Swift's Stella,

Mrs. Rebecca Dingley, was addicted to smoking. In the letters which

make up the famous Journal to Stella, there are several references

by Swift to the presents of tobacco which he was in the habit of

sending to Mrs. Dingley. On September 21, 1710, he wrote: I have the

finest piece of Brazil tobacco for Dingley that ever was born. In the

following month he again had a great piece of Brazil tobacco for the

same lady, and again in November: I have made Delaval promise to send

me some Brazil tobacco from Portugal for you, Madam Dingley. In

December, Swift was expressing his hope that Dingley's tobacco had not

spoiled the chocolate which he had sent for Stella in the same parcel;

and three months later he wrote: No news of your box? I hope you have

it, and are this minute drinking the chocolate, and that the smell of

the Brazil tobacco has not affected it. The explanation of all this

tobacco for Mistress Dingley is to be found in Swift's letter to

Stella of October 23, 1711. Then there's the miscellany, he writes,

an apron for Stella, a pound of chocolate, without sugar, for Stella,

a fine snuff-rasp of ivory, given me by Mrs. St. John for Dingley, and

a large roll of tobacco which she must hide or cut shorter out of

modesty, and four pair of spectacles for the Lord knows who. The

tobacco was clearly not for smoking, but for Dingley to operate upon

with the snuff-rasp, and so supply herself with snuff--a luxury, which

in those days, was as much enjoyed and as universally used by women as

by men.



Even Quakeresses sometimes smoked. A list of the sea-stores put on

board the ship in which certain friends--Samuel Fothergill, Mary

Peisly, Katherine Payton and others--sailed from Philadelphia for

England in June 1756, is still extant. In those days Atlantic passages

were long, and might last for an indefinite period, and passengers

provisioned themselves accordingly. On this occasion the passage

though stormy was very quick, for it lasted only thirty-four days. The

list of provisions taken is truly formidable. It includes all sorts of

eatables and drinkables in astonishing quantities. The Women's

Chest, we are told, contained, among a host of other good and useful

things, Balm, sage, summer Savoury, horehound, Tobacco, and Oranges;

two bottles of Brandy, two bottles of Jamaica Spirrit, A Canister of

green tea, a Jar of Almond paste, Ginger bread. Samuel Fothergill's

new chest contained tobacco among many other things; and a box of

pipes was among the miscellaneous stores.



The history of smoking by women through Victorian days need not detain

us long. There have always been pipe-smokers among the women of the

poorer classes. Up to the middle of the last century smoking was very

common among the hard-working women of Northumberland and the Scottish

border. Nor has the practice by any means yet died out. In May 1913, a

woman, who was charged with drunkenness at the West Ham police court,

laid the blame for her condition on her pipe. She said she had smoked

it for twenty years, and it always makes me giddy! The writer, in

August 1913, saw a woman seated by the roadside in County Down,

Ireland, calmly smoking a large briar pipe.



It is not so very long ago that an English traveller heard a

working-man courteously ask a Scottish fish-wife, who had entered a

smoking-compartment of the train, whether she objected to smoking. The

good woman slowly produced a well-seasoned cutty pipe, and as she

began to cut up a fill from a rank-smelling tobacco, replied: Na,

na, laddie, I've come in here for a smoke ma'sel.



The _Darlington and Stockton Times_ in 1856 recorded the death on

December 10, at Wallbury, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, in the

110th year of her age, of Jane Garbutt, widow. Mrs. Garbutt had been

twice married, her husbands having been sailors during the Napoleonic

wars. The old woman, said the journal, had dwindled into a small

compass, but she was free from pain, retaining all her faculties to

the last, and enjoying her pipe. About a year ago the writer of this

notice paid her a visit, and took her, as a 'brother-piper,' a present

of tobacco, which ingredient of bliss was always acceptable from her

visitors. Asking of her the question how long she had smoked, her

reply was 'Vary nigh a hundred years'! In 1845 there died at Buxton,

at the age of ninety-six, a woman named Pheasy Molly, who had been for

many years an inveterate smoker. Her death was caused by the

accidental ignition of her clothes as she was lighting her pipe at the

fire. She had burned herself more than once before in performing the

same operation; but her pipe she was bound to have, and so met her

end.



The old Irishwomen who were once a familiar feature of London

street-life as sellers of apples and other small wares at street

corners, were often hardened smokers; and so were, and doubtless still

are, many of the gipsy women who tramp the country. An old Seven Dials

ballad has the following choice stanza--



_When first I saw Miss Bailey,

'Twas on a Saturday,

At the Corner Pin she was drinking gin,

And smoking a yard of clay._



Up to about the middle of Queen Victoria's reign female smoking in the

nineteenth century in England may be said to have been pretty well

confined to women of the classes and type already mentioned.

Respectable folk in the middle and upper classes would have been

horrified at the idea of a pipe or a cigar between feminine lips; and

cigarettes had been used by men for a long time before it began to be

whispered that here and there a lady--who was usually considered

dreadfully fast for her pains--was accustomed to venture upon a

cigarette.



In Puck, 1870, Ouida represented one of her beautiful young men, Vy

Bruce, as murmuring idlest nonsense to Lilian Lee, as he lighted one

of his cigarettes for her use--but Lilian Lee was a _cocotte_.



An amusing incident is related in Forster's Life of Dickens, which

shows how entirely unknown was smoking among women of the middle and

upper classes in England some ten years after Queen Victoria came to

the throne. Dickens was at Lausanne and Geneva in the autumn of 1846.

At his hotel in Geneva he met a remarkable mother and daughter, both

English, who admired him greatly, and whom he had previously known at

Genoa. The younger lady's conversation would have shocked the prim

maids and matrons of that day. She asked Dickens if he had ever read

such infernal trash as Mrs. Gore's; and exclaimed Oh God! what a

sermon we had here, last Sunday. Dickens and his two daughters--who

were decidedly in the way, as we agreed afterwards--dined by

invitation with the mother and daughter. The daughter asked him if he

smoked. Yes, said Dickens, I generally take a cigar after dinner

when I'm alone. Thereupon said the young lady, I'll give you a good

'un when we go upstairs. But the sequel must be told in the

novelist's own inimitable style. Well, sir, he wrote, in due course

we went upstairs, and there we were joined by an American lady

residing in the same hotel ... also a daughter ... American lady

married at sixteen; American daughter sixteen now, often mistaken for

sisters, &c. &c. &c. When that was over, the younger of our

entertainers brought out a cigar-box, and gave me a cigar, made of

negrohead she said, which would quell an elephant in six whiffs. The

box was full of cigarettes--good large ones, made of pretty strong

tobacco; I always smoke them here, and used to smoke them at Genoa,

and I knew them well. When I lighted my cigar, daughter lighted hers,

at mine; leaned against the mantelpiece, in conversation with me; put

out her stomach, folded her arms, and with her pretty face cocked up



sideways and her cigarette smoking away like a Manchester cotton mill,

laughed, and talked, and smoked, in the most gentlemanly manner I

ever beheld. Mother immediately lighted her cigar; American lady

immediately lighted hers; and in five minutes the room was a cloud of

smoke, with us four in the centre pulling away bravely, while American

lady related stories of her 'Hookah' upstairs, and described different

kinds of pipes. But even this was not all. For presently two Frenchmen

came in, with whom, and the American lady, daughter sat down to whist.

The Frenchmen smoked of course (they were really modest gentlemen and

seemed dismayed), and daughter played for the next hour or two with a

cigar continually in her mouth--never out of it. She certainly smoked

six or eight. Mother gave in soon--I think she only did it out of

vanity. American lady had been smoking all the morning. I took no

more; and daughter and the Frenchmen had it all to themselves.

Conceive this in a great hotel, with not only their own servants, but

half a dozen waiters coming constantly in and out! I showed no atom of

surprise, but I never _was_ so surprised, so ridiculously taken aback,

in my life; for in all my experience of 'ladies' of one kind and

another, I never saw a woman--not a basket woman or a gipsy--smoke

before! This last remark is highly significant. Forster says that

Dickens lived to have larger and wider experience, but there was

enough to startle as well as amuse him in the scene described. The

words cigar and cigarette are used indifferently by the novelist,

but it seems clear from the description and from the number smoked by

the lady in an hour or two, that it was a cigarette and not a cigar,

properly so called, which was never out of her mouth.



The ladies who so surprised Dickens were English and American, but at

the period in question--the early 'forties of the last century--one of

the freaks of fashion at Paris was the giving of luncheon parties for

ladies only, at which cigars were handed round.



The first hints of feminine smoking in England may be traced, like so

many other changes in fashion, in the pages of _Punch_. In 1851,

steady-going folk were alarmed and shocked at a sudden and short-lived

outburst of bloomerism, imported from the United States. Of course

it was at once suggested that women who would go so far as to imitate

masculine attire and to emancipate themselves from the usual

conventions of feminine dress, would naturally seek to imitate men in

other ways also. Leech had a picture of A Quiet Smoke in _Punch_,

which depicted five ladies in short wide skirts and bloomers in a

tobacconist's shop, two smoking cigars and one a pipe, while one of

the inferior animals behind the counter was selling tobacco. But this

was satire and hardly had much relation to fact.



It was not until the 'sixties of the last century that

cigarette-smoking by women began to creep in. Mortimer Collins,

writing in 1869, in a curious outburst against the use of tobacco by

young men, said, When one hears of sly cigarettes between feminine

lips at croquet parties, there is no more to be said. Since that date

cigarette-smoking has become increasingly popular among women, and the

term sly has long ceased to be applicable. Punch's Pocket-Book for

1878 had an amusing skit on a ladies' reading-party, to which Mr.

Punch acted as coach. After breakfast the reading ladies lounged on

the lawn with cigarettes.



What Queen Victoria, who hated tobacco and banished it from her

presence and from her abodes as far as she could, would have thought

and said of the extent to which cigarette-smoking is indulged in now

by women, is a question quite unanswerable. Yet Queen Victoria once

received a present of pipes and tobacco. By the hands of Sir Richard

Burton the Queen had sent a damask tent, a silver pipe, and two silver

trays to the King of Dahomey. That potentate told Sir Richard that the

tent was very handsome, but too small; that the silver pipe did not

smoke so well as his old red clay with a wooden stem; and that though

he liked the trays very much, he thought them hardly large enough to

serve as shields. He hoped that the next gifts would include a

carriage and pair, and a white woman, both of which he would

appreciate very much. However, he sent gifts in return to her

Britannic Majesty, and among them were a West African state umbrella,

a selection of highly coloured clothing materials, and some native

pipes and tobacco for the Queen to smoke.



Many royal ladies of Europe, contemporaries of Queen Victoria and her

son, have had the reputation of being confirmed smokers. Among them may

be named Carmen Sylva, the poetess--Queen of Roumania, the Dowager

Tsaritsa of Russia, the late Empress of Austria, King Alfonso's mother,

formerly Queen-Regent of Spain, the Dowager Queen Margherita of Italy

and ex-Queen Amelie of Portugal. It is, of course, well known that

Austrian and Russian ladies generally are fond of cigarette-smoking. On

Russian railways it is not unusual to find a compartment labelled For

ladies who do not smoke.



The newspapers reported not long ago from the other side of the

Atlantic that the smart women of Chicago had substituted cigars for

cigarettes. According to an interview with a Chicago hotel proprietor,

the fair smokers select their cigars as men do, either black and

strong, or light, according to taste. How in the world else could

they select them? It is not likely, however, that cigar-smoking will

become popular among women. For one thing, it leaves too strong and

too clinging an odour on the clothes.



One of the latest announcements, however, in the fashion pages of the

newspapers is the advent of Smoking Jackets for ladies! We are

informed in the usual style of such pages, that the well-dressed

woman has begun to consider the little smoking-jacket indispensable.

This jacket, we are told is a very different matter to the braided

velvet coats which were donned by our masculine forbears in the days

of long drooping cavalry moustaches, tightly buttoned frock-coats, and

flexible canes. The feminine smoking-jacket of to-day is worn with

entrancing little evening or semi-evening frocks, and represents a

compromise between a cloak and a coat, being exquisitely draped and

fashioned of the softest and most attractive of the season's beautiful

fabrics.



There are still many good people nowadays who are shocked at the idea

of women smoking; and to them may be commended the common-sense words

of Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, formerly of Ripon, who arrived in New York

early in 1913 to deliver a series of lectures at Harvard University.

The American newspapers reported him as saying, with reference to this

subject: Many women in England who are well thought of, smoke. I do

not attempt to enter into the ethical part of this matter, but this

much I say: if men find it such a pleasure to smoke, why shouldn't

women? There are many colours in the rainbow; so there are many tastes

in people. What may be a pleasure to men may be given to women. When

we find women smoking, as they do in some branches of society to-day,

the mere pleasure of that habit must be accepted as belonging to both

sexes.



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