[Original]
ON WOMEN AND TOBACCO
I see that Mr Joynson Hicks and Mrs Bramwell Booth have been talking to women very seriously on the subject of smoking. “Would you like to see your mother smoke?” asked Mr Hicks of the Queen's Hall audience he was addressing, and Mrs Bramwell Booth pictured the mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face of the baby she was nursing. I confess I have mixed feelings on this subject, and in order to find out what I really think I will write about it. And in the first place let us dispose of the baby. I do not want to see mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face of the baby. But neither do I want to see father doing so. If father is smoking when he nurses the baby he will, I am sure, turn his head when he puffs out his smoke. Do not let us drag in the baby.
The real point is in Mr Hicks' question. Would your respect or your affection for your mother be lessened if she took to smoking. He would not, of course, ask the question in relation to your father. It would be absurd to say that your affection for your father was lessened because he smoked a pipe or a cigar after dinner. You would as soon think of disliking him for taking mustard with his mutton. It is a matter of taste which has no moral implications either way. You may say it is wasteful and unhygienic, but that is a criticism that applies to the habit regardless of sex. Mr Hicks would not say that women must not smoke because the habit is wasteful and unhygienic and that men may. He would no more say this than he would say that it is right for men to live in stuffy rooms, but wicked for women to do so, or that it is right for men to get drunk but wrong for women to do so. In the matter of drunkenness there is no discrimination between the sexes. We may feel that it is more tragic in the case of the woman, but it is equally disgusting in both sexes.
What Mr Hicks really maintains is that a habit which is innocent in men is vicious in women. But this is a confusion of thought. It is mixing up morals with customs. Custom has habituated us to men smoking and women not smoking, and we have converted it into a moral code. Had the custom been otherwise we should have been equally happy with it. If Carlyle, for example, had been in Mr Hicks' audience he would have answered the question with a snort of rage. He and his mother used to smoke their pipes together in solemn comradeship as they talked of time and eternity, and no one who has read his letters will doubt his love for her. There are no such letters from son to mother in all literature. And of course Mr Hicks knows many admirable women who smoke. I should not be surprised to know that at dinner to-night he will be in the company of some women who smoke, and that he will be as cordial with them as with those who do not smoke.
And yet.... Last night I was coming along Victoria Street on the top of a bus, and saw two young women in front light cigarettes and begin to smoke. And I am bound to confess I felt sorry, as I always do at these now not infrequent incidents. Sorry, and puzzled that I was sorry, for I had been smoking a cigarette myself, and had not felt at all guilty. If smoking is an innocent pleasure, said I, which is as reasonable in the case of women as in the case of men, why should I dislike to see women smoking outdoors while I am doing the same thing myself? You are an irrational fellow, said I. Of course I am an irrational fellow, I replied. We are all irrational fellows. If we were brought to the judgment seat of pure reason how few of us would escape the cells.
Nevertheless, beneath the feeling there was a reason. Those two young women smoking on the top of the bus were a symbol. Their trail of smoke was a flag—the flag of the rebellion of women. But then I got perplexed again. For I rejoice in this great uprising of women—this universal claim to equality of status with men. It is the most momentous fact of the time. And, as I have said, I do not disapprove of the flag. Yet when I saw the flag, of which I did not disapprove (for I wore it myself), flaunted publicly as the symbol of the rebellion in which I rejoice, I felt a cold chill. And probing to the bottom of this paradox, I came to the conclusion that it was the wrong symbol for the idea. These young women were proclaiming their freedom in false terms. Because men smoked on the top of the bus they must smoke too—not perhaps because they liked it, but because they felt it was a little daring, and put them on an equality with men. But imitation is not equality: it is the badge of servility and vulgarity. The freedom of women must not borrow the symbols of men, but must take its own forms, enlarging the empire of women, but preserving their independence and cherishing their loyalty to their finer perceptions and traditions.