Blowing Smoke on the Ideal Victorian Lady

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 ...

Cigarette display box label - updated image, 3/28/2024; collection of the author

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.

Courtesy of the Barbara Rusch Collection.

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.

Courtesy of the Sonny Jackson Collection.