The Gendered Social Politics of Health Issues

Since the late 1960s in the United States, the women’s health movement has emphasized that health issues are never merely medical, but are shaped by historical, social, personal, and political dynamics. Each of these books contributes to scholarship dedicated to understanding how these forces have operated, and what the consequences have been for women’s bodies and lives. The authors illustrate women’s and health experts’ perspectives, presenting women as central actors in defining public health issues and analyzing how social understandings of gender and gender roles influence public, governmental, professional, and individual responses to health concerns.

Kerry Segrave’s book documents how women smokers gained the same level of acceptance as male smokers by 1950. Beginning his study in 1880, Segrave also presents opposition to smoking. He identifies this period as the “innocent years,” preceding dominant medical warnings against tobacco use. The author’s presence is less pronounced than in the other books reviewed, and the main contribution of this book is its documentation of varied public attitudes toward women’s cigarette smoking. The text does not include a discussion of methods; one sentence states that research was conducted at three Canadian institutions “using various online and traditional databases” (2). The majority of sources are newspaper articles, eye–catching advertisements (sources not given, which will frustrate readers seeking originals), film stills, and actress/model photographs. As with Segrave’s other books, the focus is on public culture.

Segrave adheres to a chronological, four–period timeline based on widespread shifts in public attention to women’s smoking, and a concise, but repetitive, organization. Three chapters are devoted to each of four time periods and the categories “Abroad,” “America,” and “The Opposition.” The book provides an overview of the period before 1880, the year women’s tobacco use—pipe–smoking, snuff dipping, or less so, cigarette smoking—became an issue of public attention despite the fact that women did not use tobacco in public. Segrave offers an analysis of the class and regional (primarily in Europe and the United States) differences in and meanings of women’s tobacco use. Women’s cigarette smoking dominated public attention, with cigarettes being seen as both “more effeminate and more vicious than any other form of tobacco” (9). Segrave provides dramatic quotes to illustrate the passion of debate around women and smoking; for example, “Between the lips of a woman [the cigarette] was generally regarded as no less than a badge of questionable character” (12). Between 1880 and 1908, women reformers, particularly members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), sought to ban smoking by everyone and emphasized the moral and health ills of smoking for women and minors. The WCTU and other organizations successfully pressured states and territories to ban the sale of cigarettes to minors (42). Lucy Page Gaston was a leading anticigarette reformer who was deputized by the Chicago police and went to court over 600 times in ten years to prosecute tobacco dealers who violated the law (46). In this same period there was little opposition to tobacco use in other parts of the world.

American women’s smoking was on the rise, partially attributed to importation of cigarettes and pro–smoking attitudes from Europe, in the period 1908 to 1919. Whether it was proper or legal for women to smoke in public was the main question, and “as World War I ended...