14. Cigarette smoking became the dominant form of tobacco consumption in the early 20th century
The advent of commercially manufactured cigarettes, and aggressive advertising for them, led to a boom in tobacco consumption across the globe. Even before cigarettes were commercially manufactured on a large scale, Allen and Ginter had introduced cigarette cards in their packets of cigarettes. Collections of the cards, in multiple different series, encouraged smoking. The women’s suffrage movements adopted cigarette smoking as a sign of equality, even as they merged with temperance movements to suppress alcohol consumption. Women smoking was considered a social outrage among the male leaders of the day. In 1908, a woman smoking in public in New York City was arrested for her effrontery. Congress considered banning women from smoking in the District of Columbia in the early 1920s. Eager to develop a new market for their products, cigarette companies marketed brands directly towards women.
As had happened with snuffboxes centuries earlier, manufacturers developed new fashion items to accommodate smokers. Cigarette cases, slim boxes often made of gold or silver, elegantly engraved, appeared in jewelry stores, tobacco shops, and in department stores. They afforded the user a more debonair means of carrying cigarettes than the packs in which the product was delivered by manufacturers. Lighters also appeared, ranging in style from the mundane, mass-produced Ronson to jeweled custom-designed lighters from Tiffany. Women’s use of cigarettes expanded widely during the First World War and in the Roaring Twenties, despite efforts by governments around the world to contain it. By the 1930s women smoked freely in public, in the increasingly popular films of the day, and women’s smoking rooms were added to hotels and other establishments, to prevent feminine encroachment on the men’s smoking rooms.