“Liberation Sticks” or “Coffin Nails”? Representations of the Working Woman and Cigarette Smoking in Canada, 1919–1939

When Canadian women first took up public smoking in the 1920s, the attraction was a complex one, both for them and for advertisers. Newly enfranchised and moving into the workforce in ever greater numbers, the (usually) young and single waged or salaried woman sought a ready symbol for her liberation as well as the pleasures resulting from the product itself to encapsulate the presumed freedom of the era. Commercial interests both responded to women’s personal and cultural goals and furthered them by reconceptualizing smoking in the public mind as a behaviour associated with respectable, middleclass women in public spaces. Despite this representation, the archetypal woman smoker in the 1920s was a waged or salaried woman, not a middleclass one. Working women defined the image of the female smoker.