Smoke Screen: Women's Smoking and Social Control

Jane M. Wilson is a Toronto-based chartered financial analyst in the
investment business.

In her foreword, Greaves describes three teenage friends who smoked and
who went on in life to be abused by men and by the establishment. When
this exasperating consecution is followed by the opinion that “women
experience the world as a series of gendered social and economic
circumstances and smoking must be considered in this context,” we have
ample warning of a feminist essay.

Despite the author’s most earnest efforts, this woman-as-victim
thesis nervously skitters alongside an always looming woman-as-idiot
corollary. Greaves appears to draw her hypotheses, if not her
conclusions, from a survey purposely limited to “self-identified”
feminists and residents of women’s shelters. Her less-than-profound
theory that women will smoke (or drink or overeat?) because they are
unhappy becomes a tautological threnody exhaled through five chapters.
Greaves accepts nicotine’s benefit to mental ability and weight
management, yet persists in a purely transcendal approach and would have
us believe that “the meaning[s] of smoking and female identity” are
“pivotal questions [that] gnaw at women smokers.”

Predictably, the book covers advertising (manipulative) and health
risks (the usual sensational statistics, many since discredited) and
exhorts governments to take action. It redeems itself in far too few
pages about the cultural history of women’s smoking, tobacco’s many
fluctuations on the moral barometer, and the surprisingly long history
of the tobacco abolition movement. Its reproduced wartime cigarette
advertisements are a reminder of the undeniable symbolic element of
women’s smoking in earlier days. However interesting, Greaves’s
obsession with this last aspect becomes irritating, and the potential
for a more dispassionate and balanced study that might have appealed to
a broader readership is lost.