Updated: Jan 15
Please check out the interesting update (29 June 2024) with new photo at the boom of the 23 March 2024 blog post, "Blowing Smoke on the Ideal Victorian Lady." Just a little something extra, thanks to the contribution of one of my readers.

Updated: Jan 15
Long, long ago, when I was just a little tyke, my mom put a big weight on my shoulders: she told me I had a good angel sitting on my right shoulder and a bad angel on my left shoulder. It was important that I listen to the good angel and not the bad angel, she counseled. I struggled with tinnitus in both ears even in those early years and I think that’s why I had a hard time knowing which voice I was listening to; at least that’s my excuse for my youth. And at 69, my tinnitus is worse than ever, so forgive me for everything.
Figuring out how to deal with Heaven and stay out of Hell has been a struggle throughout human history, mainly because it’s just so darned hard to walk the straight and narrow path that it would seem leads back to Heaven.
The earliest European colonists in North America were certain that they were actors on a great stage controlled by its writer, director, and producer: God. And as certain as they were that their lives were blessed and buffeted by Him, they also knew that Satan was real, with an army of demons that he unleashed to destroy the weakest among mankind. If the wary Christian didn't faithfully and rigidly follow God's commandments, they would be attacked, consumed, and controlled by the Devil and his minions, doomed to eternal pain and torment in the underworld of fire and brimstone, as an angry and vengeful God looked the other way.

The Bible, the great word of God, told them it was so. It contained spine-tingling stories of devils that had taken possession of the bodies of people and beasts. "Be sober, be vigilant" the Bible read, "because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour." The Gospel of Luke, Chapter 8, told of seven evil spirits who had been in the body of Mary Magdalene. Mark, Chapter 9, recited how the disciples had been unable to heal a boy who was possessed by a spirit that made him deaf and mute. It often hurled the boy “into the fire, and into the waters, to destroy him.” Whenever it seized him, “he foameth, and gnasheth with his teeth, and pineth away." And in the fifth chapter of Mark there was the man who lived in a tomb, the very symbol of death, whom no chains could subdue; when Jesus asked the impure spirit his name, the chilling reply was "My name is Legion: for we are many."
As colonists read these accounts, their skin crawled with the thought that they might have their own demons inside themselves, proven by the wicked thoughts that inevitably seeped into their minds and the sins they secretly and frequently committed. The good part of them didn't want to, but the devil made them do it.
During 1692-93 over 200 people in Salem, Massachusetts, were accused of witchcraft and conspiring with their demonic animal familiars to do the bidding of the Devil. Eventually these dark, terrifying charges proved to be a combination of malicious falsehoods and tragic delusions by the accusers, clergy, lawmen, and judges who had prosecuted innocent people, executing twenty of them.
The Salem trials tragically occurred at the tail end of centuries of mankind viewing itself as merely dust being kicked up in the battle between an all-powerful, vengeful God and his nemesis, the Devil, the evil incarnate. As history moved forward through the end of the 17th and all of the 18th century, American life focused on material gain and to a lesser degree on attaining an eternal reward.
In the 19th century, newspaper accounts of Jack the Ripper and Lizzy Borden were eagerly followed by a public luridly curious about the evil extremes to which people would go, whether crazed or criminal masterminds, but the Devil got little credit for causing or directing their mayhem. The pursuit of reason, enlightenment, technology, and scientific advancement didn’t kill belief in the Devil, however; it only made him more bearable by defusing his power and danger. A refined empirical process of more scientific and rational investigation had made witchcraft accusations wither away; witches faded into folklore characters who scared little children at Halloween, and demons became the metaphors for the evils and illnesses that caused suffering and even death.
Devils became an advertising trope. Armies of horned, leathery-winged, pointy-tailed devils were now graphic Victorian metaphors emblazoned with the names of diseases and bodily evils on their wings and torsos, always defenseless, scared, and running or flying away from their all-powerful vanquisher – not God, but the advertised 19th century medicine.

Parker’s Ginger Tonic made such exorcisms look easy. The seated gentleman was very relaxed as he confidently held up a box of the product to put the threatened attack of child-sized demons into total disarray. Their childish, even cartoonish depiction suggested they were easy targets that never had a chance against such a grown-up, sophisticated medicine.

In another image for Parker’s, a larger army of devils attacked a small family, causing some fear among the mother and daughter, who clung to Father. Good choice: he stood heroically tall, holding up a bottle of Parker’s Ginger Tonic with stoic resolve. Like a masculine Statue of Liberty, the bottle scared away the demons of cramps, dyspepsia coughs, and diarrhoea (and unspecified ills surely carried by the other devils, subliminally implying that the tonic cured even more illness than its label and testimonials promised).
A box of Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills was even more aggressive, anthropomorphically sprouting legs and muscular arms and wearing boxing gloves, punching the lights out of malaria and the rest of the devilish lot who can be seen had a long history of accomplishing their hellish deeds. A long table behind the main event is littered with human bones and empty bottles of other products that had failed to stop their diseased evils. This battle royale is apparently occurring in Hades itself, which has bats (creatures from the underworld) and an owl (creature of the night) flying above, and fire (and perhaps a bit of brimstone below), the heat of which may have hinted at the cause of all the devils being shown in their traditional, red-skinned hues.


The confident hand of a professional in control of the situation (implied by the suit jacket and cufflinked shirt sleeve) emerges from the top right of the image pointing with his index finger (think Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel masterpiece), to the name on the bottle of Girondin Deodorizer & Disinfectant that he is pouring, to the great alarm and destruction of the many misshapen demons of “diphtheria, scarlet, typhoid fevers, and all other zymotic diseases ….” A winged angel and little cherubs hover on the heavenward side of the bottle, peacefully watching the destruction of hell below. Good and Evil are on opposite sides of the main character, each appropriately affected by the right choice being made with Girondin: early roots of my mother’s counsel, perhaps?
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a long-running advertising campaign for Raid insecticide showed all types of bugs being sent into a panic because they knew the product was their unavoidable destroyer in the same way that Parker’s Ginger Tonic, Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills, and Girondin Deodorizer & Disinfectant had stampeded the disease-carrying devils. Today, devils and demons are seldom mentioned in advertisements, no longer even deserving credit for causing sickness and pain; at best, they’ve been reduced from devils of disease to disgusting bugs. Polls about theology claim most Americans are moving on with their lives, increasingly dismissive of the Devil, like he doesn’t even exist. If they’re wrong, the future might start heating up.

Lynn Massachusetts history - History of medicine - 19th-Century Health Remedies - Vintage Medical Ephemera - 19th-century medicine
Updated: Jan 15
NOTICE: This article has been updated as of 20 June 2024: additional image of a woman smoking in an ashtray - contributed by Sonny Jackson of California. See bottom of article - well worth the look!
The 1890s were a decade squarely focused on ideal form and fashion: women with hourglass shapes, perfect complexions, and smoldering Gibson Girl looks, expertly coiffed and always wearing the latest fashions. No one felt the strain of presenting properly for public appearance more than the Victorian woman. She was told by men and media to be stylish, beautiful, and a lady. There was more pressure on a woman to be ideal than there was on her body from the corset she wore, and just like the corset, she was expected to maintain proper form all day long. It was considered undeniable that she was “the weaker sex,” physically and intellectually inferior to men, dependent upon and subservient to her husband, and designed for beauty, virginal modesty, domestic duty, and motherhood. Any behaviors breaching this mold were viewed as morally, socially, and physically dangerous, and signs of an unvirtuous and fallen woman – certainly no lady.
A perfect example of this physical and behavioral confinement of woman was the rigid social construct that a gentleman could freely smoke but a lady never should. A New York physician’s statement on the matter was copied in many newspapers as if it was a public service health announcement:
… ladies … take the use of cigarettes to their very great detriment. … men are [not] often injured by the moderate use of tobacco in smoking. But the female body is no more adapted to the use of tobacco than the female mind is to mathematics. It causes neuralgia, headache, dyspepsia, palpitation of the heart, and worse than all, ruins the complexion and disorders the teeth. ... all will agree that the stale odor of tobacco coming from a woman's mouth is worse than the same smell exhaled by a man. ... men's nervous systems are not so impressionable as women's, and hence a man can do many things with impunity, or even benefit, which would be impossible for a woman to do without great risk. ... beauty ... is the smallest gift a woman can have, for it not only means aesthetic enjoyment for all that look at her, but it means a healthy mind and a healthy body ...

Poor frail, fragile creatures, the doctor insisted, clearly the weaker sex ...
Despite laws and social mores, women and adolescents were smoking those “obnoxious and injurious cigarettes” and men and boys were spitting out tobacco juice at or across the path of oncoming members of the fairer sex for amusement or out of sheer meanness. Tobacco use was becoming ubiquitous and its smokey seduction was settling over men, women, and children across the country like a London fog. On January 1st, 1891, a newspaper squib read, “A good many New Year anti-tobacco resolutions will end up in smoke.”
Some companies quickly recognized the growing interest of young women to explore the cigarette experience by sneaking smokes, so they tried to pitch the social acceptability of allegedly medicinal cigarettes to alleviate symptoms of colds, allergies and asthma (pretty much all conditions falling under the catch-all term, catarrh). A few of these products, like Perrin’s and Marshall’s, offered cigarettes made from cubebs, a tropical bush of the pepper family with a very pungent taste and aroma that was often difficult for the smoker and bystanders to enjoy. But hey, it’s medicine, and strong, off-putting aromas and flavors were considered signs of its medicinal qualities and benefits: if it was yucky, it must be good medicine.

The two companies were producing the same type of medicated cigarettes, using the dried-up, ground berries of the cubeb plant, but their approach to advertising was very different.
Dr. Perrin’s advertising trade card showed their cubeb cigarettes being used by the whole family: Grampa and Gramma are in the lower corners, both looking old and weary; the son in this family is wearing knickers and has schoolbooks tucked under his arm and his sister is in the other corner (with a short skirt that emphasized her youth rather than suggesting her to be a fallen woman); and in the center was mom, relaxing in her comfy stuffed chair, her feet up on the hassock, a book in one hand and her Dr. Perrin’s cigarette in the other. The message was clear: cubeb cigarette smoking is okay – "everyone's doing it." The smoke that emanates from the entire family's cigarettes or lips is clear – it was purposely understated to make the activity less offensive and to get the reader to focus on the medicinal nature of the advertising message. Perrin’s was trying to encourage the use of their cubeb cigarettes by both sexes and all ages because of the product’s alleged health benefits for all; they were definitely trying to avoid any impression that they were attempting to break Victorian mores.

Marshall’s went in the opposite direction with the subtlety of a runaway freight train. What I find especially interesting about the Marshall’s advertising matter shown here is the manufacturer’s effort to show that the trademark woman smoking their cubeb cigarette is still the Victorian ideal of a beautiful, genteel lady. But if that was the intention, it just doesn’t work. It seems highly unlikely that those who frowned on females smoking could have their opinions changed by this image. She looks like a tough,
hardened woman with smoke rising from her cigarette and her lips; she’s not even trying to exhale discreetly to the side. She looks completely relaxed, not at all worried about being caught in a guilty pleasure – and she is purposely blowing billowing plumes of smoke like a factory smokestack, not to mention that she is demonstrating a skill at creative smoking – not just making smoke rings, but a full advertising message: “Marshall’s Prep’d” ("Prepared," emphasizing they were ready-made, so ladies didn't have to futz around with rolling the ground cubebs into cigarette papers like the men were constantly doing to make their tobacco cigarettes). So by skywriting in smoke she had “skills,” I guess, but she still looks more like a saloon floozie than a Victorian lady.
Then again, that may be exactly the type of woman Marshall’s was going for – not a floozie, but a young woman who was ready and willing to break barriers, listen to her own desires and blow smoke in the face of stodgy, controlling husbands, crusty clergy, and prim society women who still weren’t willing to make waves – or clouds of smoke.
For more on Victorian women and cigarettes, see:
PROMISING CURES,
Vol.3, Chapter 9: Heroine Addiction
Vol.4, Chapter 10: Exposing the Naked Truth
UPDATE (28 March 2024): My dear friend, Barbara Rusch, offered me the use of the following image from her collection as an appropriate addition to this post on the Victorian cultivation of young women as smokers. She called it my article on "Smokin' Hot Women" - indeed, a better title for this topic than I had given to this blog. Given the manufacturer's use of this young model to promote Sweet Sixteen cigarettes (not "medicinal" cubebs but actual tobacco cigarettes), this advertisement is clearly designed not only to sell this brand of cigarettes but to encourage the sexualization of young women and immodest behavior. Then as now; some things never change.

UPDATE (29 June 2024): Sonny Jackson of California sent me this image of an ashtray he owns. He immediately thought of the great graphics in the ashtray when he read my article, "Blowing Smoke on the Ideal Victorian Lady", "Smokin' Hot Women" in the July/August 2024 issue of Antique Bottle & Glass Collector. He wrote to me:
"This item was dug here in the San Francisco Bay area and dates between the late 1890s to sometime after the San Francisco earthquake. ... A young friend gave it to me about 45 years ago - he dug out in Hastings Slough near Concord. Looks like maybe it's made of some type of pewter. The little emblem in the left top corner shows the Capital and says Washington, DC. Measures approximately 5 x 7 inches."
Thanks so much for sending me this image, Sonny. I love how the design combines the young woman and the smoke of her cigarette. If you follow the smoke trail from her cigarette, it becomes the long strands of her hair, or vice versa. I also think its more than just coincidence that the geometry of the smoke rings she's artfully blowing is repeated in her hoop earring. The subliminal message seems to be that through her vice, she and the cigarette have become one.
The surreal element turns out to be the U.S. Capitol building framed by the words "Capitol" and "Washington D.C.," hovering over the back side of her head. It's obviously nothing more than an indication that it is a souvenir from the nation's capitol, but masters of metaphor might imply that the government was sanctioning the ruin of women by allowing the tobacco industry to continue turning cigarettes into the national vice.
