The Freedom to Smoke: Tobacco Consumption and Identity (review)

Jarrett Rudy’s concise and engaging monograph The Freedom to Smoke claims that ‘liberal ideals structured the ritual of smoking’ (5). In contrast to other cultural histories of smoking, which seek to draw linkages between the suggestive powers of advertisers and those of consumers, Rudy adheres to a different perspective, observing that what most determined smoking trends, preferences, products, and actors were liberal ideals about who was and wasn’t ‘free’ to smoke.

Modelling his study on the work of British historian Mathew Hilton, Rudy provides an analysis of the role that tobacco production and consumption played in Montreal. Setting the study in Montreal, the heart of the Canadian business community and the centre of the tobacco industry, gives Rudy a rich canvas with which to work. Drawing upon corporate, governmental, press, religious, and voluntary society records, this well-researched cultural history offers a compelling appraisal of the class, racial/ethnic, and gendered meanings inherent in tobacco production and consumption between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. In the late-nineteenth century, Rudy notes that tobacco consumption in Montreal was primarily a male preserve. Young male smokers, and female smokers, were morally suspect and largely vilified – one for health concerns the other for lack of respectability. While this work is rich in analysis about gendered smoking codes, it is equally compelling when discussion turns to ethnicity and class issues – whether delving into the rich symbolism of the French Canadian preference for ‘le tabac canadien,’ or exploring the role of connoisseurship in the marketing and consumption of more exclusive, expensive, and American-style tobacco to Anglo Montrealers. Rudy’s analysis is multifaceted, and he explores the world of tobacco from the vantage point of all stakeholders – industry, government regulators, agriculture, advertising, and consumers.

While Rudy is to be commended for his exhaustive approach to the topic, and for the attention he pays to local, national, and international contexts and historiography in telling the tale of tobacco use (particularly exemplary is his case study of the Canadian cigar industry), this book is at its strongest in the later chapters, where he focuses more exclusively on the mass marketing of cigarettes. As Rudy correctly notes, after manufacturers linked their products with quality leaf (in particular, the terroir of the tobacco), skilled labour, and discerning consumers, the advent of the mass-produced cigarette posed a challenge to the tobacco industry. The transformative moment arrived with the First World War, where the efficiency of cigarette smoking triumphed over the previous general preference for pipe tobacco because of the exigencies of the soldier’s lot. The military, government, industry, and volunteers banded together to provide soldiers with cigarettes as part of their efforts to support the war effort and, in so doing, made the cigarette a marker of masculinity and patriotism. This shift moved the cigarette from a fringe product, utilized by elites and dandies, into something acceptable for all men. The last appropriate commercial frontier for cigarette manufacturers was female consumers. This divide was broached in the post-war era, when (according to Rudy) women’s gains in education, employment, and public life led to their receptivity to and, indeed, demands for, the right to smoke. Shrewd advertisers capitalized on women’s demands for inclusion in Canadian society, and thus female smokers became commonplace in public places, if not entirely accepted by all segments of society. While Rudy does permit space for the anti-smoking lobbyists (in particular the WCTU and the Catholic Church), he does not indicate that their aversions have to do with a critique of liberal individualism; rather, both groups cite more mundane concerns –health, women’s maternal roles, and the health of future generations if women smoked during pregnancy.

In conclusion, Freedom to Smoke contributes to a growing literature that seeks to expand the definitions and progression of liberal individualism outside of the narrowly political realm. In particular, the author is most persuasive in linking individualism and gendered [End Page 124...