subject: Women And The Cigarette Smoking Habit [print this page] It is hard to say just how long the habit of smoking tobacco has been around. Since the turn of the twentieth century it grew into a habit that more and more people had taken up. During the 1920's women began smoking in public all of the time and it just became the normal thing to do. It lost the taboo effect that it had for them for so long. Women were stepping out of the roles they had been bound to in the home and trying new careers and freedoms like voting and smoking. Little did they realize at the time what a profound effect it could eventually have on their health.
During the thirties, forties, and fifties, women movie stars were very often seen in their roles smoking a cigarette. They were considered sexy and in charge of their own destinies. This might have been the catapult that eventually caused housewives everywhere to take up the smoking habit. Perhaps it made them feel somewhat more glamorous in some way to be able to smoke. It might have been their one show of defiance to indicate that they too could do as they chose.
It has taken fifty years and more for women to discover that there is definitely nothing elegant, cool or classy connected with smoking tobacco. It is not so much that it is basically a nasty and smelly habit, although that is bad enough, it is the health issues surrounding it that have become the real concern. These days, more and more women are never starting to smoke at all and those that already do wish they never had started in the first place. Anyone, male or female can never truly grasp what a serious addiction smoking is until they have already become addicted and make their first attempt at quitting.
With the emphasis that is placed on beauty and health at this time, no one wants to be recognized as a cigarette smoker. It stains the teeth and can eventually cause decay and rotting. It makes you smell very bad and there is nothing attractive about it. There are not even many places left where a person can smoke tobacco anyway and for those that do it, it has become a big annoyance more than any kind of pleasure.
Young girls are being steered clear of smoking by most magazines and beauty products, but there are still a large number of teen girls that pick up the habit today for the very same reasons that women began smoking about a hundred years ago. They want some kind of acceptance that they will not find in a cigarette. It is just a shame that so many of them will become addicted to smoking and only later realize that it was the last thing they ever needed to make them a woman.
