Smoking Etiquette for Women

There actually was quite a bit of smoking etiquette in the etiquette books at the time. Above is a photo of an advertisement promoting Lucky Strike cigarettes. The advertisement features etiquette authority, Amy Vanderbilt. Still, Dick West’s informative humor on the subject was well worth the read!

WASHINGTON - (UPI) - I think I will award this week's “it's about time” citation to Miss Helen Hart, a consumer services director for the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. The citation is a sort of decoration I have devised as a means of giving recognition to people who do something that should have been done a long time ago.

IT CONSISTS OF a parchment scroll bearing the imprint of an hourglass on a field of bitten-off fingernails. You'll find a bit of symbolism in the design in you look hard enough. Miss Hart deserves a citation, I believe, for having drawn up what possibly is the first set of rules of female smoking-etiquette.

This Emily Post of the nicotine habit puts down in black and white a policy that I have long advocated orally: If women are going to smoke, and it sure looks like most of them are going to, they should carry their own cigarettes.

“ALWAYS ACCEPT the cigarette that is offered to you - even though it is not your brand,” she writes. “On the next round, be alert to offer your own brand: that way you'll avoid having to reject another offer, and be doing your share of the ‘treating.’”

I am grateful to Miss Hart for making a definite point of etiquette out of what has heretofore been only a vague economic issue. However, I would have to quarrel with her ranking system.

SHE LISTS THIS admonition as No. 3 on her etiquette set. I feel it should be made the cardinal rule and, if necessary, enacted into law. I also have some misgivings about her No. 4 rule. “Let your escort light your cigarette,” it says. “Many women are too quick to do the job themselves - why not keep this gentlemanly custom alive?”

I think this is a custom most gentlemen would just as soon drop and I was glad that Miss Hart softened the rule with an amendment; “don’t demand a light if one is not offered; this simply points up a man’s lack of alertness.”

I COULD NAME off-hand a half dozen women of my acquaintance who seem to delight in pointing up my lack of alertness. Generally, they do this in some demure manner, like calling out “hey, slob, how about a light?”

The rest of Miss Hart’s rules are fairly routine pointers on how to hold cigarettes gracefully between the first joints off the index and second fingers, how to inhale, no short, nervous puffs and how to dispose of ashes, tap the cigarette slowly but ah so so deliberately and I wish, however, that she had added one more rule to the effect that a lady should always remove a cigarette from her mouth when she is about to be kissed. — Dick West, in the San Bernardino Sun, 1960

 🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia