Sex, Lies and Cigarettes: Canadian Women, Smoking and Visual Culture, 1880–2000 by Sharon Anne Cook (review)

Sex, Lies and Cigarettes: Canadian Women, Smoking and Visual Culture is the long-awaited second monograph by Sharon Anne Cook, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Ottawa. It is a wide-ranging study of the relationship between women and smoking, using a wide range of historical and visual records, and traces the involvement of women both as opponents of smoking and as smokers over two centuries. Cook’s overall conclusion is that women’s interaction with smoking was complex, but she affirms throughout the volume that women’s attraction to smoking was in fact a liberating choice on their part, one that permitted them to fully enjoy the pleasures of the “interconnected processes of modernity, sexualization, and commodification of desire.” In short, smoking was one of the primary means by which women projected themselves as modern.

Cook’s database is very broad, as she draws – often somewhat haphazardly – from many sources, including government publications; the records of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union; popular media, including Chatelaine and the Canadian Home Journal; and school textbooks and other educational materials, as well as the more conventional advertisements of the cigarette manufacturers, on which she builds her narratives of women’s increasing engagement with smoking culture. Despite the use of such sources, she has also canvassed select first-person documents such as diaries and letters as well as oral history interviews in an effort to demonstrate how women themselves thought about smoking in an effort to highlight the element of choice in women’s lives. In some respects, however, the title of this book is misleading, for in including women who campaigned against smoking, Cook avoids the fact that a vast amount of the prescriptive, educational, and advertising literature she studies was directed toward men. Further, much of the visual documentation that is furnished throughout the volume concerns men, and even the erotic visual promotion of women in cigarette advertisements was aimed at inducing men to purchase cigarettes; this gender bias begins to change only after the Second World War. The first two chapters are the most historical treatment in the volume, as they reprise Cook’s earlier study of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, with some new material on their anti-smoking campaigns, but the remaining chapters in the book shift rather abruptly in terms of their temporal focus, which not only papers over the often limited scope of the evidence from any particular period but results in a rather annoying flattening out of historical context, which is all but lost through this technique. As much as Cook quite rightly has sought to attempt to narrate the decision of women to smoke, this makes it clear that finding evidence for this is difficult, and as a result Cook all too often depends on the views of writers in popular magazines and governmental publications to fill in the gaps. As an illustration of Cook’s methodological approach, she analyzes the diaries of two single women who worked during the 1920s and 1930s but who did not smoke, in order to demonstrate the high degree of stress at work, and then uses the prevailing printed prescriptive literature, which argued that smoking might relieve anxiety, to explain why women turned to smoking. In some respects, the large ambitions of this book are its undoing, for in attempting to explain why women smoked over a period of more than 100 years, the author is often compelled to depend on explanatory frameworks that are vast. Thus, she focuses on a wide range of cultural and social forces to explain women’s “complex” relationship with smoking, including postwar urbanization, wage labour, secularization, women’s suffrage, and the “quiet death of maternal feminism,” all of which undid Victorian notions of female respectability, in an effort to historically contextualize her narrative, when in fact her primary material provides compelling evidence that women “wanted to be one of the boys,” as...