This book explores the issue of women and smoking in the twentieth century. Focusing on the gendered construction of smoking as a practice, Rosemary Elliot uese a variety of source material from popular magazines, films and medical discourse.
Explores the many special issues that surround the impact of tobacco use on the health and well-being of women. Concentrates on the gender-specific factors that help explain why girls and women smoke and how tobacco damages their health. Covers all dimensions of the problem, ranging from conditions in developing countries that deter female smoking to the reasons why women may find it more difficult to quit than men. The impact of the tobacco industry1s efforts to recruit female smokers is also considered.
The second report from the U.S. Surgeon General devoted to women and smoking. Includes executive summary, chapter conclusions, full text chapters, and references.
Despite efforts to curb tobacco use, global tobacco addiction remains as strong as ever. Smoking rates are declining very slowly in advanced countries, and they are increasing in the developing world. Yet, researchers still do not fully understand what drives smoking decisions. Life-Course Smoking Behavior presents smoking trajectories of different generations of women and men from ten of the world's most visible countries, with nation-specific representative samples spanning more than eighty years of recent history. To inspire hypotheses on the determinants of smoking behavior, the authors place these data in economic, political, social, and cultural contexts, which differ greatly both across countries at a particular time and over time in a given country. Though significant research has been conducted on smoking statistics and tobacco control policies, most descriptions of smoking behavior rely on cross-sectional "snapshot" data that do not track individuals' habits throughout their lifespan. Lillard and Christopoulou's work is a unique and necessary text in its comparative life-course approach, making it a long overdue complement to the existing literature.
Tabloid headlines attack the binge drinking of young women. Debates about the classification of cannabis continue, while major public health campaigns seek to reduce and ultimately eliminate smoking through health warnings and legislation. But the history of public health is not a simple one of changing attitudes resulting from increased medical knowledge, though that has played a key role, for instance since the identification of the link between smoking and lung cancer. As Virginia Berridge shows in this fascinating exploration, attitudes to public health, and efforts to change it, have historically been driven by social, cultural, political, and economic and industrial factors, as well as advances in science. They have resulted in different responses to drugs, alcohol, and tobacco at different times, in different parts of the world. Opium dens in London, temperance and prohibition movements, the appearance of new recreational drugs in the 20th century, the changing attitudes to smoking: by taking us through such examples, moulded by socio-economic and political forces, including the growing power of pharmaceutical companies, Berridge illuminates current debates. While our medical knowledge has advanced, other factors help shape our responses, as they have done in the past.
Focusing on everyday life in nineteenth-century Britain and its imperial possessions”from preparing tea to cleaning the kitchen, from packing for imperial adventures to arranging home décor”the essays in this collection share a common focus on materiality, the nitty-gritty elements that helped give shape and meaning to British self-definition during the period. Each essay demonstrates how preoccupations with common household goods and habits fueled contemporary debates about cultural institutions ranging from personal matters of marriage and family to more overtly political issues of empire building. While existing scholarship on material culture in the nineteenth century has centered on artifacts in museums and galleries, this collection brings together disparate fields”history of design, landscape history, childhood studies, and feminist and postcolonial literary studies”to focus on ordinary objects and practices, with specific attention to how Britons of all classes established the tenets of domesticity as central to individual happiness, national security, and imperial hegemony.
For over a century, Italy has had a love affair with the cigarette. Perhaps no consumer item better symbolizes the economic, political, social, and cultural dimensions of contemporary Italian history. Starting around 1900, the new and popular cigarette spread down the social hierarchy and eventually, during the 1960s, across the gender divide. For much of the century, cigarette consumption was an index of economic well-being and of modernism. Only at the end of the century did its meaning change as Italy achieved economic parity with other Western powers and entered into the antismoking era. Drawing on film, literature, and the popular press, Carl Ipsen offers a view of the "cigarette century" in Italy, from the 1870s to the ban on public smoking in 2005. He traces important links between smoking and imperialism, world wars, Fascism, and the protest movements of the 1970s. In considering this grand survey of the cigarette, Fumo tells a much larger story about the socio-economic history of a society known for its casual attitude toward risk and a penchant for la dolce vita.